Ubuntu Wiki

"Linux systems organized files in a hierarchical filesystem tree, relationships are thought of in teams of children and parent. Here, a parent may have multiple children, but a child can only have one parent. In Ubuntu, root filesystem (/) become a parent, and then travel down into directories and subdirectories, so matter how many directories do you have, they only always have one parent (/)."

Ubuntu GNU/Linux Filesystem Tree Overview

-/
 |--/bin
 |--/boot
 |--/cdrom
 |--/dev
 |--/etc
 |--/initrd
 |--/home
 |  |--/home/sweet
 |  |--/home/user
 |--/lib
 |--/lost+found
 |--/media
 |  |--/media/cdrom
 |  |--/media/hda*
 |--/mnt
 |--/opt
 |--/proc
 |--/root
 |--/sbin
 |--/srv
 |  |--/srv/www
 |--/sys
 |--/tmp
 |--/usr
 |  |--/usr/bin
 |  |--/usr/doc
 |  |--/usr/games
 |  |--/usr/include
 |  |--/usr/info
 |  |--/usr/lib
 |  |--/usr/local
 |  |--/usr/sbin
 |  |--/usr/share
 |  |--/usr/src
 |  |--/usr/X11R6
 |--/var
   |--/var/log

What's in a Name?

/bin Is a place for most common use Linux program, like ls, mount, rm, and chmod.

/boot Store Linux kernel, a ramdisk image and bootloader configuration files (Lilo or Grub).

/dev For device files, these include hard disk(/dev/hda*), RAM(/dev/ram), CD-ROM(dev/cdrom) and terminal devices(/dev/tty).

/etc Contains configuration files for administration task. Some of files, such as passwd file, apache config, network config store in /etc.

/home Home sweat home, place for users' home directories.

/lib Contains very important dynamic libraries and place for kernel modules

/lost+found Some trash goes here!

/media Directory for mounting devices, such as external hard disk or removeable media (floppy, cdrom, dvdrom).

/mnt Same as /media, use to mounting devices, Since Breezy Ubuntu doesn't use /mnt as a default mounting directory, they move into /media.

/opt Use to store addition software for your system.

/proc A virtual filesystem that provides a mechanism for kernel to send information to processes.

/root The root user's home directory

/sbin Contains important administrative programs also daemon processes.

/srv The data directories of services such as HTTP (/srv/www)or FTP server.

/sys A /proc like file systems.

/tmp Place for temporary files used by applications.

/usr System resources, contains subdirectories such as /usr/bin, /usr/lib, /usr/share, /usr/include and /usr/doc.

/var Contains Directories of variable data that change rapidly. Inside there important subdirectory /var/log that manages logfiles of your system.

From Here to Where?

• [http://www.pathname.com/fhs Filesystem Hierarchy Standard]

CategoryDocumentation