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Ask HN: Why is the Windows hosts file in such an odd location?

5 points by junto ↗ HN
On modern Windows:

  %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\etc\hosts
It used to make more sense (to me at least):

  %WinDir%\HOSTS
Is it some kind of homage to UNIX or a standardization attempt?

Does anyone know why Microsoft choose that folder?

8 comments

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bhartzer
Where do you think it should be? Back at %WinDir%\HOSTS or somewhere else? Does it really matter where it is, anyway?
junto
I just was interested to know if anyone here knew the history of the decision.

Is it a "driver"? Why "etc"?

I was just adding a temporary entry to it, and was genuinely curious as to why such decisions are made.

And yes, for me that old location is less clicks in Explorer to navigate to. For most users the location irrelevant, but since I often add and remove entries it made my start thinking about it. :-)

buckyball
I really wanted to ask this many times.

> Is it some kind of homage to UNIX

this!

junto
I'd quite like this to be the case! I'm imagining some contract MS engineer with a deep love of UNIX snuck in a change to the core of Windows without anyone noticing.

I doubt it though!

dan_b
The Windows network stack is built on BSD code.