Linux Administration Cookbook

There's more...

At the bottom of your system's hier manual, you might see a reference to The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard, available at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/. This standard is, according to the manual, as follows:

"The filesystem standard has been designed to be used by Unix distribution developers, package developers, and system implementors. However, it is primarily intended to be a reference and is not a tutorial on how to manage a Unix filesystem or directory hierarchy."

This in itself isn't very helpful because it effectively says "these are more guidelines than rules", a la Pirates of the Caribbean.

Basically, use man hier as a good rule of thumb for working out how a system is laid out, but don't assume some narcissistic