A Linux machine has typical locations for the storage of most common things a system needs to run. Their contents:

/

The filesystem root where all of the "directory tree" grows out of

/boot

The kernel. This is usually a separate Partition at the beginning of the hard drive.

/bin

System executable files for use by all users

/dev

Device nodes, ie files that represent your computer's periphery

/etc

Configuration files for programs

/home

One subdirectory for each user to store all their personal files in. Your own subdirectory here is called your home and is commonly abbreviated as ~, though this must be explicitly supported by the program in question (all Shells do).

/lib

libraries needed to run the programs in /bin and /sbin

/mnt

MountPoint for temporary filesystems (eg CDROM, floppy disk)

/opt

Intended for additional, self-contained software packages in subdirectories, such as TarBalls which contain binaries rather than source. KDE is often found in /opt/kde, even though it doesn't fit the "self-contained" criterion. Some people install source TarBalls in here too, especially beta software.

/proc

A virtual FileSystem containing pseudo files with information about the hardware and Kernel configuration and the running processes

/root

Home directory of the root SuperUser

/sbin

Executable files only of interest to the root SuperUser

/usr

Files that can be shared across a whole site among multiple users

/usr/local

Anything shared across the system but not supplied by the system vendor traditionally goes here -- most commonly, packages compiled from TarBalls

/var

Variable data files, such as logs, mail and printer spools

/tmp

Temporary files -- that is literally temporary files. On some systems this directory is frequently purged, and on machines with modern Linux kernels it may be mounted as Tmpfs FileSystem that exists only in memory. When VirtualMemory subsystems were not as good as they are today, many userland programs had to explicitly balance memory and disk consumption in /tmp/, and some still do (such as find(1)).

More information can be found at the filesystem hierarchy standard, and in hier(7).

CategoryBeginners