Top-level directories in UBUNTU

[Robert P. J. Day]

On Fri, 14 Mar 2008, Lennart Sorensen wrote:

> 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.

/sys is also supposed to represent the hierarchical layout of the
system devices as well, for the purposes of things like proper
shutdown.  /proc has no such structure.

rday
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Robert P. J. Day
Linux Consulting, Training and Annoying Kernel Pedantry:
    Have classroom, will lecture.

http://crashcourse.ca                          Waterloo, Ontario, CANADA
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