Questons about the Linux directory structure

[LastStop]

Can someone give me a brief explanation of the directory stucture of Linux? Where would I put my personal files such as mp3's pictures. I know I can probably put them anywhere but what's the proper location? Thanks.

 

[Workin']

If the files belong only to you (i.e., are not shared on the network with every user) then

/homes/<your linux account name>/anydirectoryyouwant...

If they are shared out on your network then it's not so clear-cut.

 

[Chaotic42]

Eh, I have my mp3s on their own partition, mounted to /mnt/music. Only users in group audio have access.
My pictures are in my home directory, ~/images.

Just don't put them somewhere like /sbin or anything 😉

BTW, on every distro I've seen it's /home, not /homes.

 

[Abzstrak]

whats wrong with c:\my documents\mp3s\ ?







😉

 

[xirtam]

What's up, homes?

 

[pac1085]

Try man hier. I found it very useful when I was learning the filesystem hierarchy.

 

[TheOmegaCode]

Originally posted by: Abzstrak
whats wrong with c:\my documents\mp3s\ ?







😉

That's the default directory structure of win9.x operates. That's the problem...

 

[Abzstrak]

the 😉 meant it was a joke..


it doesn't matter where you put things

 

[Derango]

Originally posted by: Abzstrak
the 😉 meant it was a joke..


it doesn't matter where you put things

Well...yes it does. You don't want to put MP3s in /etc/ for example.

 

[Chaotic42]

Originally posted by: Derango


Well...yes it does. You don't want to put MP3s in /etc/ for example.

Ahem

um

of course not....

that would be

um

stupid........

I'll be back in a second.......

 

[hoihtah]

Originally posted by: Derango

Originally posted by: Abzstrak
the 😉 meant it was a joke..


it doesn't matter where you put things

Well...yes it does. You don't want to put MP3s in /etc/ for example.

for those of us just starting out on linux...
would you care to explain why?

 

[Nothinman]

for those of us just starting out on linux...
would you care to explain why?

The each directory in the basic Linux directory structure has a 'purpose', to help things work between distributions and be semi-standardized.

/bin is for essential utils needed during boot, before the network may be up.
/sbin is for admin utils that are needed before the network is up
/usr/bin is for day to day use tools that aren't needed until /usr is mounted and the network is up
/usr/sbin/ is for admin utils that aren't needed until /usr is mounted and the network is up
lib directories are generally for the same purpose as the bin directories except they have shared libraries (i.e. dlls) instead of executables
/usr/local is for programs compiled just for the local host.
/etc is for configuration files
/var is for frequently changing files, mostly logs, mail and news spools.
/home is for user home directories
/proc is for process information, in Linux it's been expanded to hold a lot of kernel variable information
/tmp is for temporary files, this can be put on another partition to avoid filling up the / partition, or if you have the memory it could be a ramdisk or virtual memory filesystem.

There's documentation in the LSB that probably explains things better than I can.

A lot of the reasoning takes into account situations that a lot of people won't even think of, like mounting /usr and/or /home over the network via NFS is popular for a lot of reasons. Hell if you really want you can mount the whole root filesystem via NFS and not have a local hard disk.

 

[cleverhandle]

As Nothinman said, besides distribution consistency, the standards are mostly motivated by large network considerations - particularly distinguishing between shared/unshared and static/variable types of directories in order to make big networks more secure and efficient. The current FHS standards are here. You can download the docs a page up.