GoboLinux - Fun with File System Hierarchy [LWN.net]

GoboLinux - Fun with File System Hierarchy

Posted Jan 22, 2004 21:25 UTC (Thu) by tsinclai (subscriber, #11399)
In reply to: GoboLinux - Fun with File System Hierarchy by bjn
Parent article: GoboLinux - Fun with File System Hierarchy

I was just about to mention that!

On OS X, for those unfamiliar:

/Applications - default directory for apps (primarily GUI apps)
/System and /Library - system-wide preferences and other library files
/Users - user home directories
When you install the developer tools, they are primarily located in /Developer

/usr, /tmp and others are still there when you pop up a command prompt, but hidden in the
GUI file system view.

As for whether this is a good way to organize things or not, perhaps I'm not the person to
ask. I'm used to the traditional *NIX hierarchy so I can typically find things pretty easily.
However, I teach Linux system administration and newbies frequently have trouble
navigating the file system.

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GoboLinux - Fun with File System Hierarchy

Posted Jan 23, 2004 17:49 UTC (Fri) by dbrandon (guest, #1090) [Link]

And the nice thing about OS X is that this hierarchy extends down to the user and up to the
network. They call them "Domains" and have User, Local, Network and System. So, /Library
is just the local domain. There's also ~/Library (User), /Network/Library (Network) and /
System/Library (System). A properly behaved program will look at all of these for a
resource. The search order is User, Local, Network, System. (See Inside Mac OS X, System
Overview chapter 9 for details.)