From: caywood@wyvern.wyvern.com (John Caywood) Subject: Re: managing files Date: Sun, 7 Mar 1993 03:45:40 GMT
Sang Kim (kims@panix.com) wrote:
: I was wondering why there are two directories for bin
: 1) /bin
: 2) /usr/bin
: are the commands in /bin supposed to be separated from commands in /usr/bin?
: or can i just put all the commands in .bin.
Historically, there was supposed to be enough utilities in the root
partition to bring up your UN*X system on 1 piece of disk only. /usr
was typically in another partition, or on another disk. So /bin contained
a minimal set of stuff (mount, format, tar, restore, ls,...) to enable you
to repair or restore your system after a disk crash. A lot of people
build linux on a single partition, so it hardly matters. Also, the
tradition got started before a clever person at Berkeley thought up symlinks,
and you can only make a hard link (ln without the -s) to a file in the same
file system.
: also what is supposed to be in /mnt ? I have it empty, and i don't know
: what the purpose is for having it.
It's where you mount something for experimenting, or mounting something
temporarily, or mounting a partition when you're moving a file system.
For example, you might
mount /dev/fd1 /mnt
to grab something off a floppy. Or suppose you just bought a new, second
hard disk. You've done fdisk on it, and mkfs, and now you want to move
some files into it, BEFORE you mount it permanently.
mount -t extfs /dev/hdb3 /mnt
cd /usr/X386
tar cf - . | (cd /mnt; tar xvf -)
Hope this helps.