[lupire]

Without looking I'm going to guess that ape is A POSIX Emulator, so we have an emulator emulating an emulator.

Edit: it's A POSIX Environment, but it still contains features that are unnatural in Plan9 and could by bypassed with more work, so much like emulation.

[SllX]

Close. It’s ANSI/POSIX Environment. It’s been there since Plan 9 second edition. I think it was put there basically for TeX, but don’t quote me on that because I no longer remember where I read that and it isn’t in the original paper.

http://doc.cat-v.org/plan_9/4th_edition/papers/ape

[anthk]

APE is not an emulator, but a tiny POSIX implementation, with shims for unneded stuff.

[anthk]

Also, today npe superseded ape.