Top-level directories in UBUNTU

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 07:21:04PM -0400, Paul King wrote:
> Anyone know what the top-level directories are supposed to look like
> under Ubuntu 7.*? This is the output of my "ls -F: command:
> 
> bin/    dev/   initrd/  lib/  opt/   sbin/  usr/      vmlinuz.old@
> boot/   etc/   initrd.img@      media/  proc/  sys/   var/
> cdrom@  home/  initrd.img.old@  mnt/    root/  tmp/   vmlinuz@
> 
> Anything strange here? To me, I am wondering why there are in effect
> two /proc directories (namely /proc and /sys)? initrd* should be
> under /boot, shouldn't it? Any comments? Where can I find the changes
> Ubuntu has made to the file system standard?

/proc and /sys are totally different.  /sys is a new 2.6 kernel thing,
while /proc is a much older invention.  In general /proc is very
disorganized, stuff has gone everywhere and not very consistently.  A
lot was meant to be human readable making it not that useful in general.
/sys on the other hand is very organized, things are meant to be machine
readable (although often human readable too), but usefulness and
predictability seems to be the primary force driving /sys.

/proc isn't going away anytime soon, but new stuff generally only ends
up in /sys, while old stuff slowly migrates over.

--
Len Sorensen
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