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Our Blogs Apexing the Linux learning curve The Linux file system
Our Blogs Apexing the Linux learning curve The Linux file system | The Linux file system |
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| by Hamish Taylor | |
| Wednesday, 23 July 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 Ok, let's continueFeatured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
/lost+found is a special folder which is used for file system recovery. I have never seen anything in there /media is another interesting folder, as when you plug in an external hard disk or a USB key or similar this is where will show up. Devices are assigned a sub-folder which is derived from the device's name. I have specially named all of my devices, so that when I plug in my external hard disk it shows up as /media/IDE320 or /media/SATA750 or /media/USB2GB. DVD and CD devices can be found here, but often they'll show up as a desktop icon too /mnt is often used to mount external filesystems (such as when connecting to a server). More on this later /opt: to be prefectly honest I don't use /opt, but it is often recommended that downloaded applications (such as I mentioned in a previous article: Gantt Project) is put into this folder. But I have found that you have to mess around with permissions and that's just too hard, so I put them into my /home folder /proc is a virtual folder that is generated when the system boots up. It keeps information on the number of connections, file systems and other relevant system information. If you jump into a terminal and type in "cat /proc/version" you'll get some information about the system. "cat /proc/cpuinfo" reveals a lot about the CPU in the system /root is the root user's home directory /sbin stores binary files (just like /bin) but these are only executable by the root user (also known as the "superuser" hence the "s" in "sbin"). These files are things that can really mess with the system, hence only being able to be used by the root user. They include the ability to format partitions, change the system time and other things /srv and /sys: no idea, never looked at them! /tmp: for temporary storage, just like the various temporary folders in Windows /usr: again to be honest, I am not 100% sure about this folder as I haven't looked at it in any detail. There are various things stored in here such as much of the systems documentation and help files. Many applications get installed in here too, so I really should know more about it! Finally, /var which is another of those interesting folders. All "var"iable sized files are stored in here, so you'll often find log files (as they change in size) in this folder, specifically in the /var/log folder. If you type the following into a terminal "tail -f /var/log/messages" then you'll get an automatically updating version of the last few lines of the "messages" log file. This is quite similar to the Event Log in Windows and is really useful in figuring out what is happening with the system. Please read onto page 3... |
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