Re: why are there /bin and /usr/bin...
On Sun, 15 Aug 2010 18:30:04 -0400, "Perry E. Metzger"
<perry@piermont.com> wrote:
>The true reason is that back in ancient days, hard drives were too
>small to put everything in one place, so ancient Unix machines at Bell
>Labs in the 1970s ended up with some programs on the root disk and
>some on the same supplementary disk where the home directories were
>typically put. This was not done with any great forethought, it was
>simply a temporary expediency. Because / was on the boot disk, it was
>necessary to make sure that every program needed for initial boot was
>there, and thus some programs were more important to put in /bin and
>the like.
>
>By the early 1990s this was long since unneeded but people continued
>to do it anyway, and in fact started to think it was done for
>technical reasons rather than because of a simple lack of space in an
>earlier era. At this point (2010), with all of the system files
>fitting in under a dollar's worth of disk space, people tell
>themselves quite elaborate "just so" stories about why the segregation
>is maintained.
I like the idea that a server in an unattended location only needs a
tiny (50 MB would be more than enough if our kernels weren't so huge)
partition to come up to a manageable state, even if the larger file
systems holding the major parts of the system were corrupted or
absent. This has enabled me to repair systems from remote more than
once in the past.
Greetings
Marc
--
-------------------------------------- !! No courtesy copies, please !! -----
Marc Haber | " Questions are the | Mailadresse im Header
Mannheim, Germany | Beginning of Wisdom " | http://www.zugschlus.de/
Nordisch by Nature | Lt. Worf, TNG "Rightful Heir" | Fon: *49 621 72739834
Reply to: