Linux Administration Cookbook

The filesystem hierarchy

In this section, we'll discuss hier and man hier as a way of determining what your filesystem's different names mean.

When you look at your system, you might question why certain folders are named in the way they are:

$ lsbin   dev  home  lib64  mnt  proc  run   srv  tmp  vagrantboot  etc  lib   media  opt  root  sbin  sys  usr  var

What's sbin or opt?

You might also be curious as to know why there's a folder called root when we're supposed to be in the root of the system, /:

[vagrant@localhost /]$ pwd/

The filesystem hierarchy has the answers you want!