Talk:Unix filesystem

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/sbin's name

Pretty sure that sbin intially stood for static linked binaries. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 173.55.202.3 (talk) 08:16, 3 May 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Ted Dickey

ted dickey? from the "textmode UI" page? what the fuck are you doing here :D :D Delt01 00:42, 11 June 2012 (UTC)

/usr/libexec is in FHS

Early versions of the FHS did not include /usr/libexec; this has since been rectified: http://www.linuxbase.org/betaspecs/fhs/fhs/ch04s07.html

That URL has "betaspecs" in it; the /usr section of the 2.3 version of the FHS doesn't mention /usr/libexec. Is there a later official version of the FHS that includes it, or is this something that will appear in a future release, such as 3.0? Guy Harris (talk) 01:33, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

So where did /sbin, /usr/sbin, and /var come from?

Actually, unless my memories are too faded, I know where they came from - some people at Sun, around the time SunOS 4.0 was being developed, were making some changes to the directory layout, oriented towards NFS-only diskless workstations (when Sun were killing of the ND remote-disk-access protocol), and one of the changes was the introduction of /var (to separate read-only stuff in /usr, with diskless workstations mounting the same export on /usr, from read-write stuff in /var, with each diskless workstation mounting its own private directory tree on /var), and another was splitting (/usr)/bin from (/usr)/sbin (not related to diskless workstations, but it was a cleanup done while they were at it, so that users who didn't need the administrative tools didn't have to have them in their $PATH).

I seem to remember a document written describing this, and possibly even being circulated outside Sun (possibly amongst licensees of NFS and/or the BSD folk). However, I can't seem to find any trace of that document online. Anybody have less-faded memories than mine? Guy Harris (talk) 01:26, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I don't have the document you want, but wouldn't /sbin have been created for the same reason? In 4.3BSD/early System V, /etc contained (writable) configuration files as well as system programs, e.g. /etc/init (now /sbin/init). QVVERTYVS (hm?) 09:58, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

(/etc/init dates back even earlier, at least to V6.)

Yeah, I think that was another reason for creating /sbin.

I think the split between /sbin and /usr/sbin, and between /bin and /usr/bin, was between "stuff we don't want to require shared libraries" and "stuff that can use shared libraries"; "stuff we don't want to require shared libraries" included "stuff that had to run before we had the file system containing the shared libraries mounted", as well as "stuff we'd like to be able to run without shared libraries so that somebody can install a test build of a shared library after saving the old version, and then back out the change in case the new shared library doesn't work", so SunOS 4.0 had either /bin/mv or /bin/cp for putting the old shared library back.

But this is all fading memories from the mid '80's, which is why I wish the stuff the Sun folks had written about this was available somewhere. Guy Harris (talk) 20:16, 18 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]