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wait /usr doesn’t mean user?
/etc has to be the worst name in there
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usr does mean user. It was the place for user managed stuff originally. The home directory used to be a sub directory of the usr directory.
The meaning and purpose of unix directories has very organically evolved. Heck, it’s still evolving. For example, the new .config directory in the home directory.
For example, the new .config directory in the home directory.
I hope slowly but surely no program will ever dump its config(s) as
~/.xyz.conf(or even worse in a program specific~/.thisapp/; The~/.config/scheme works as long as the programs don’t repeat the bad way of dumping files as~/.config/thisconfig.txt. (I’m looking at you kde folks…) A unique dir in .config directory should be mandatory.If I ever need to shed some cruft accumulated over the years in ~/.config/ this would make it a lot easier.
Per the graphic, it means Unix System Resources…
I don’t trust a graphic which explains /boot as “system boot loader files”…
It kind of makes sense on many BIOS/UEFI-less systems where e.g. Uboot is used. And it does contain things like kernel images, sometimes initRD files etc. (which may not be bootloader files but are still system boot files).
Why? What’s inaccurate about it? I have no idea and would like to learn.
It’s not wrong, but it feels a bit like some tech articles you’ll see which are obviously just created to fluff up a CV. I wouldn’t say avyttring here is flat out wrong, just kinda… lacking.
But yeah, /boot holds “system boot loader files”, sure, but that’s a bit vague. It should contain your kernel and initramcpio and IIRC Grub also had its config here. That’s pretty much it. I would’ve rather said /boot contains the kernel.
“device files” it’s so vague that it’s almost wrong IMO. At first glaze I would’ve thought that it means drivers rather than, say, “interfaces to devices”
Well that’s a shame for me. This graphic finally made the Linux file directory structure make sense to me
It meant user, as in user-installed programs and libraries for this system over the core system programs and libraries of the operating system in /bin and /lib.
Someone learned it wrong, but otherwise I think the image is right.
I wonder why that isn’t /cfg? Is there a historical reason?
It’s probably the standard in both POSIX and the Single UNIX Specification, so I guess ask Ken Thompson?
Is there a historical reason?
If you’re asking that in anything Linux related, it’s probably a Yes 99% of the time LMAO
Not just Linux… 99% of the time you see something weird in the computing world, the reason is going to be “because history.”
Looks at the entire networking stack
Yup (unfortunately)
Windows 11 is still reserving A and B drive for floppy discs.
Try naming a folder “CON” in Windows and learn the magic of old spaghetti code by a multi billion dollar company.
According to this, it’s been around since the 70’s and was originally just a catch-all for files that didn’t fit in the other default directories, but over time has come to be mostly used for config files. I assume it would cause utter mayhem to try and change the name now so I guess it just sticks. Someone suggested “Edit To Configure” as a backronym to try and make it make more sense if that helps anyone lol.
I too expected it to be “et cetera”.
huh… an exe in my /bin ?
sus…
wow i have needed this forever and im printing it and pinning it to my wall
i always thought /usr stood for “user”. Please tell me I’m not the only one
It’s always been for USeR binaries. It’s the first time I’ve seen this bizarre backronym (40 years of Unix here).
I think it originally did under old Unix, it was what /home is nowadays; “Unix System Resources” is a backronym.
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Yup same. I always wondered why there was a user folder when we already have home.
I thought it was United System Resources.
And I still don’t know what’s the point in separating /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.
Also /mnt and /media
Or why it’s /root and not /home/rootThey hold “system binaries” meant for root user. It’s not a hard distinction but many if not most Linux fundamentals have their roots in very early computing, mainframes, Bell and Xerox, and this good idea has been carried into the here&now. Not sure about the provenance of this one, but it makes sense. isn’t /mnt /media different between distros? These aren’t hard and fast rules - some distros choose to keep files elsewhere from the “standard”.
/bin and /usr/bin, one is typically a symbolic link to another - they used to be stored on disks of different size, cost, and speed.
https://refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/FHS_3.0/fhs/ch03s16.html
https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/5915/difference-between-bin-and-usr-bin
/sbin are system binaries, eg root only stuff, dunno the rest but I would guess there are some historical reasons for the bin usr/bin separation
I know the distinction between /bin and /sbin, I just don’t know what purpose it serves.
Historically, /bin contained binaries that were needed before /usr was mounted during the boot process (/usr was usually on a networked drive).
Nowadays that’s obsolete, and most distros go ahead and merge the directories.It’s easier to manage security that way.
Instead of having one binary folder full of stuff that’s intended to be run with privilege access and non-privilege access, all the privileged stuff goes in sbin and you don’t even see it in your path as a regular user. It also means that access rights can be controlled at the folder level instead of the individual file level.
And I still don’t know what’s the point in separating /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.
This goes back to the olden days when disk space was measured in kilo and megabytes. /sbin/ and /usr/sbin have the files needed to start a bare bone Unix/Linux system, so that you could boot from a 800kb floppy and mount all other directories via network or other storage devices as needed.
Is there a reason to keep this structure other than „we’ve always been doing it like that“/backwards compatibility?
The structure is changing, many distributions already are merging more and more of the duplicated subdirectories in /usr/ with the counterparts in / but it takes time to complete that and at the moment those subdirectories are often still there but as symlinks to be compatible with older software (and sysadmins).
/home is often on a separate volume. You’d want root to be available in a maintenance situation where /home may not be mounted.
I don’t recall the reasons for the addition but /media is newer than /mnt.
I don’t recall the reasons for the addition but /media is newer than /mnt.
Something to do with hard-coded mounts in
/etc/fstabvs. dynamically-mounted removable media (USB drives etc.), I think.I’ve also seen autofs network automounts go in /net
Mostly historical reasons, /home was often a network mounted directory, but /root must be local.
And only regular users have their home in /home
Idk why I feel compelled to add this info, but / doesn’t have to be local as long as the necessary kernel modules for mounting it are available in the initrd or built into the kernel.
Yes, that is true. I was speaking in the context of very early Unix/Linux before initrd was a thing.
I think /mnt is where you manually mount a hard drive or other device if you’re just doing it temporarily, and /media has sub folders for stuff like cdrom drives or thumb drives?
Yeah, but why?
You can mount a hard drive anywhere, and why not put all the cdrom and thumbdrive folders in /mnt, too?/mnt is meant for volumes that you manually mount temporarily. This used to be basically the only way to use removable media back in the day.
/media came to be when the automatic mounting of removable media became a fashionable thing.
And it’s kind of the same to this day. /media is understood to be managed by automounters and /mnt is what you’re supposed to mess with as a user.
It gets even more complicated nowadays because most DE will mount removable drives somewhere in folders like /run/$USER/
/media is for removable drives. If you mount something there, file managers like Gnome will show you the “eject” or “disconnect” button.
/mnt drives show up as regular network drives without that “eject” functionality.
I don’t know if I’m doing something wrong, but I have a secondary SSD in my laptop that I mount on
/mnt/elyssaand in every DE and distro I tried it appeared as a removable drive with the “eject” button. Right now I use Fedora with Gnome and if I install this extension or enable the removable drives option in Dash to Dock, it shows me that drive. Maybe some mount option in Gnome Disks, but since it’s not that big of a problem, I haven’t looked too much into it.
I was just about to post the same thing. I’ve been using Linux for almost 10 years. I never really understood the folder layout anyway into this detail. My reasoning always was that /lib was more system-wide and /usr/lib was for stuff installed for me only. That never made sense though, since there is only one /usr and not one for every user. But I never really thought further, I just let it be.
Likewise.
It’s also only just now dawning on me /bin is short for /binaries. I always thought it was like… A bin. like a junk drawer hidden in a cupboard
Same. I actually feel like I remember the professor of my only unix class saying that. Hoping I’m wrong.
You’re not the only one 😅 🙋
Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969. Well around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5 megabytes each) for storage.
When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp…) and wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES. And thereafter /usr is used to store user programs while /home is used to store user data.
source: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html
THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES
Me in 2024 holding a 4TB NVMe stick: Still not enough (it’s never enough)
Same, but with a 22TB drive for /data loooool
This thread is 3 MB
Linux file system is ext* tho.
Is there a version of this that wasn’t awkwardly resized?
Best I could find is this copy on imgur.
New knowledge. Thanks.
Is Gobo case-insensitive by default? Typing those seems annoying.
Thank you for that, I always wondered about the meaning behind a few of these directories.
Just know this isn’t a universal layout and depends on the distro.
Yeah I know, like sbin isn’t used in most modern distros, right?
what a mess
There’s a little historical baggage, but look at Windows: multiple letters for drives, and all of the paths can be modified, so you have to ask Windows where any important directory is physically mapped (like SystemRoot or Documents or Temp or Roaming AppData or many others), because it doesn’t have this nice consistent structure like Linux. Linux presents a logical layer and manages the physical location automatically. Windows makes you do the logical lookup yourself, but doesn’t enforce it, so inexperienced programmers make assumptions and put stuff where the path usually is.
That’s part of why logging in to Windows over a slow connection can take forever if you have a bunch of Electron apps installed: they’ve mismapped their temp/cache directory under the Roaming AppData, so it gets synched at every login, often GiB of data, and they refuse to fix it.
I switched to Linux a few years ago and you are not wrong.
Windows is a nightmare with directory organization.
Saved games can go:
- My Documents/
- My Documents/Games
- My Documents/My Games
- <app>/saved-games
I’m more used to seeing shit like: c:/users/username/appdata/local/developer/game/engine/data3/saves/profile0/epe90_cats90-slot203.nonstandardfileformat
And then their non standard file format turns out to just be a zip file or gzipped JSON data 😂
/bin confused me for a while because I thought it meant ‘this stuff is trash, don’t worry about it’.
I always thought /usr was for “user”… TIL
It did, let me explain:
On the original (ie Thompson and Ritchie at Bell in 1969-71), I think it was a PDP-11, they installed to a 512kb hard disk.
As their “stuff” grew they needed to sprawl the OS to another drive, so they mounted it under /usr and threw OS components that didn’t fit.
https://landley.net/writing/unixpaths.pdf
I’ve done the same, outgrew so you mount under a tree to keep going, it just never became a historical artifact.
It is, this infographic is wrong. Or I guess technically some other standard could define it like the infographic, but the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard defines it as a secondary hierarchy specifically for user data.
/usr used to be the user home directory on Unix…well most of them. I think Solaris/SunOS has always been /export/home as I recall.
Huh. I did as well. Like /use/bin was for user installed applications and such. You learn something everyday.
A pedantic thing to say, surely, but the title really should’ve been: “Linux Directory Structure” – ‘Linux filesystems’ (the title in the graphic) refers to a different topic entirely; the title of this post mitigates the confusion a bit, though still, ‘directory structure’ is the better term.
Sure but for example I understand that /dev and /proc are actually kind of filesystems on their own
To be more pedantic the correct title would be the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS)…which describes the directory structures
Yep, You are right. Done
Right?
I was expecting superiors to the fat & exfat file storage systems
It feels like
/opt's official meaning is completely lost on developers/packagers (depending on who’s at fault), every single directory in my/optbelongs to standalone software that should just be put into either/usr/libor/usr/sharewith some symlinks or scripts into/usr/bin.No, they have it right. Add-on software means “added to this node/machine”, as in not part of the system image used to configure multiple machines. It’s all very archaic.
I’ve also seen creating there deployment or configuration stack of your choice.
I rarely spot /srv in the wild.
I use /data for local server data.
Pretty sure openmediavault uses it, but that’s the only one I’ve seen
