I do /volumX for additional hard drives.

For most network share I use /mnt/$server.

I’m gonna blow everyone’s mind… I have my Linux system in a relatively small 4gb drive, and my home in a 4Tb drive. I mount my 4tb drive to /home/me as someone already said.

If my SSD for my OS takes a shit as people say, all you do is install it again, change fstab to swap the home directory and you’re back in business like nothing happened. That’s like 10 minutes install time on a good SSD these days. The other guy who mentioned this, didn’t point this out. The idea of separating my home folder into its own drive didn’t occur to me for years and years of using Linux. Every wrong update I was there copying home like a total windows 11 noob. I also install my extra drives and shares on /mnt, that’s standard.

On debian when i mount an ftp server through my file browser it uses gvfs

This will mount it to /run/user/1000/gvfs/ftp:host=<IP>,port=<PORT>,user=<fpt-user>

I’ve also seen creating there deployment or configuration stack of your choice.

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.

You’re not the only one 😅 🙋

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/root

I think it originally did under old Unix, it was what /home is nowadays; “Unix System Resources” is a backronym.

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: lists.busybox.net/pipermail/…/074114.html

Yup same. I always wondered why there was a user folder when we already have home.

Same. I actually feel like I remember the professor of my only unix class saying that. Hoping I’m wrong.

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.

It’s always been for USeR binaries. It’s the first time I’ve seen this bizarre backronym (40 years of Unix here).

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

NixOS enters the room wearing a “/nix/store” t-shirt.

That’s what I thought too. This is directory structure, not file systems.

Meanwhile the Linux Standards Base cries in a corner.

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Y’all got this! Good luck 🍀

Since almost everything on the right would be located in /home/<username> on the left, it should include some of the subdirectories of %windir%\

Also /lib is where some people keep discarded capitalists

It seems handy when you’re learning about stuff but only when you haven’t learned enough to realize it’s not correct.

Can you recommend one that is correct? I use pop_os (Ubuntu) and Arch. Kinda curious about either one

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The logic was just that when UNIX was originally evolving, they ran out of disk space on their PDP-11 and had to start moving less-essential binaries to a different disk. That’s why it’s “/usr/” which was originally for user data but that disk happened to have free space.

Any other explanation is just retcon. Some distros try to simplify things.

Much better, thanks!

Cool. Thanks for sharing!

Thanks! I’ll save this, tell myself I’m going to strictly follow it this time and forget about it (again) lol

I still have no clue where permanently attached USB SSDs are supposed to be mounted. I just shove them into LVM2 and put the mapper under /mnt since putting them under /home wouldn’t let other users access them.

Edit: Thank you, found it on your shared link ! 😄

Oh wow thank you ! Would it be to much to ask for a dark mode version? If there’s a one hit button to change into a more eye friendly color mode :)

Either way, thank your for sharing your work :))

It can fits as a desktop wallpaper.

Best I could find is this copy on imgur.

What is outdated?

/bin and /sbin are symlinks already from /usr, so that’s more than half of “apps”.

That’s not POSIX

No one ever looks at /var? Isn’t that where my Apache dir lives? Sorry, I’ve been off Linux for a while. I think I put Git in there as well.

I always thought it stood for user. I even say it that way.

It’s just short for “user;” “User System Resources” is probably a backronym.

This email explains it in detail: lists.busybox.net/pipermail/…/074114.html

TLDR: /usr stands for user

Nah, it’s just that /proc is incorrect - it contains information about running processes, as well as kernel data structures as visible by the process reading them.

No I thinks is basically right although could be better worded maybe

/sys is virtual file structure for kernel system info

/proc is virtual file structure of kernel process info

My understanding is /proc came first but was abused/free for all and started being used for all sorts of non standard/process kernel access. So /sys was created with stricter rules to make it more standardised.

I wonder why that isn’t /cfg? Is there a historical reason?

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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.

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.

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.

Pretty sure openmediavault uses it, but that’s the only one I’ve seen

What’s the reason?

Where would you mount non-removable media?

learned this the hard way when I started to get usrmerge errors when I tested an upgrade to Debian trixie.

I learned that just now.

I used to pronounce it like yuzr, knowing that it wasn’t user, but not knowing what it was.
Now I have better context. Maybe I’ll go with U.S.R.

usr did originally mean user and held user data.

Pretty sure this is a bacronym

Just know this isn’t a universal layout and depends on the distro.

Me too

Great username

Is Gobo case-insensitive by default? Typing those seems annoying.

why

/srv stands probably for serve as in serving static files like static websites. (Source)

More information here: refspecs.linuxfoundation.org/…/index.html

To be more pedantic the correct title would be the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS)…which describes the directory structures

Sure but for example I understand that /dev and /proc are actually kind of filesystems on their own

Right?

I was expecting superiors to the fat & exfat file storage systems

Yep, You are right. Done

Huh. I did as well. Like /use/bin was for user installed applications and such. You learn something everyday.

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.

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.

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.

This image shows how the system stores it’s own stuff. Your junk will go in /home/mtchristo/whatever you want.

If you don’t like that, you can do whatever you want. Linux will let you.

Think of it like in Windows where you have this structure.

You can just create partitions and mount them at whatever path you like.

Hell, you can do /c/not/sure/why/you/like/this/better/clownfarts_penis

It should be in /bin or /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. You can use “which” command to know