Footnotes:

Footnotes:

¹ Well, not knowingly, although I have been bitten by operating systems with more lawyers than Linux has developers

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Top of Chapter, Table of Contents, Show Frames, No Frames
© 1996-1999 David A Rusling copyright notice.

The first thing that most new users shifting from Windows will find
confusing is navigating the Linux filesystem. The Linux filesystem
does things a lot more differently than the Windows filesystem.
This article explains the differences and takes you through the
layout of the Linux filesystem.
For starters, there is only a single hierarchal directory structure.
Everything starts from the root directory, represented by '/', and then
expands into sub-directories. Where DOS/Windows had various partitions and
then directories under those partitions, Linux places all the partitions
under the root directory by 'mounting' them under specific directories.
Closest to root under Windows would be c:.
Under Windows, the various partitions are detected at boot and assigned a
drive letter. Under Linux, unless you mount a partition or a device, the
system does not know of the existence of that partition or device. This
might not seem to be the easiest way to provide access to your partitions
or devices but it offers great flexibility.
This kind of layout, known as the unified filesystem, does offer several
advantages over the approach that Windows uses. Let's take the example of
the /usr directory. This directory off the root directory contains most of
the system executables. With the Linux filesystem, you can choose to mount
it off another partition or even off another machine over the network. The
underlying system will not know the difference because /usr appears to be
a local directory that is part of the local directory structure! How many
times have you wished to move around executables and data under Windows,
only to run into registry and system errors? Try moving c:windowssystem
to another partition or drive.
Another point likely to confuse newbies is the use of the frontslash '/'
instead of the backslash '' as in DOS/Windows. So c:windowssystem would
be /c/windows/system. Well, Linux is not going against convention here.
Unix has been around a lot longer than Windows and was the standard a lot
before Windows was. Rather, DOS took the different path, using '/' for
command-line options and '' as the directory separator.
To liven up matters even more, Linux also chooses to be case sensitive.
What this means that the case, whether in capitals or not, of the
characters becomes very important. So this is not the same as THIS or ThIs
for that matter. This one feature probably causes the most problems for
newbies.
We now move on to the layout or the directory structure of the Linux
filesystem. Given below is the result of a 'ls -p' in the root directory.
bin/ dev/ home/ lost+found/ proc/ sbin/ usr/
boot/ etc/ lib/ mnt/ root/ tmp/ var/
/sbin - This directory contains all the binaries that are essential to the
working of the system. These include system administration as well as
maintenance and hardware configuration programs. Find lilo, fdisk, init,
ifconfig etc here. These are the essential programs that are required by
all the users. Another directory that contains system binaries is /usr/sbin.
This directory contains other binaries of use to the system administrator.
This is where you will find the network daemons for your system along with
other binaries that only the system administrator has access to, but which are
not required for system maintenance, repair etc.
/bin - In contrast to /sbin, the bin directory contains several useful
commands that are used by both the system administrator as well as
non-privileged users. This directory usually contains the shells like
bash, csh etc. as well as much used commands like cp, mv, rm, cat, ls.
There also is /usr/bin, which contains other user binaries. These binaries
on the other hand are not essential for the user. The binaries in /bin
however, a user cannot do without.
/boot - This directory contains the system.map file as well as the Linux
kernel. Lilo places the boot sector backups in this directory.