Running Linux, 5th Edition

Important Directories

You already know about /home, where user files are stored. As a system administrator and programmer, several other directories will be important to you. Here are a few, along with their contents:

/bin

The most essential Unix commands, such as ls.

/usr/bin

Other commands. The distinction between /bin and /usr/bin is arbitrary; it was a convenient way to split up commands on early Unix systems that had small disks.

/sbin

Very common commands used by the superuser for system administration.

/usr/sbin

Commands used less often by the superuser for system administration.

/boot

Location where the kernel and other files used during booting are sometimes stored.

/etc

Files used by subsystems such as networking, NFS, and mail. Typically, these contain tables of network services, disks to mount, and so on. Many of the files here are used for booting the system or individual services of it and will be discussed elsewhere in this book.

/var

Administrative files, such as log files, used by various utilities.

/var/spool

Temporary storage for files being printed, sent by UUCP, and so on.

/usr/lib

Standard libraries, such as libc.a. When you link a program, the linker always searches here for the libraries specified in -l options.

/usr/lib/X11

The X Window System distribution. Contains the libraries used by X clients, as well as fonts, sample resources files, and other important parts of the X package. This directory is usually a symbolic link to /usr/X11R6/lib/X11.

/usr/include

Standard location ...