Sysadmins and anyone else writing administrative scripts should be intimately familiar with the following system directories.
/bin
Binary executables. Basic system programs and utilities (such as bash).
/usr/bin [1]
More system executables.
/usr/local/bin
Miscellaneous executables.
/sbin
Superuser binaries. Basic system administrative programs and utilities (such as fsck).
/usr/sbin
More superuser binaries.
/etc
Et cetera. Systemwide configuration scripts.
/etc/rc.d
Boot scripts, on Red Hat and derivative distributions of Linux.
/usr/share/doc
Documentation for installed packages.
/tmp
System temporary files.
/var/log
Systemwide log files.
/var/spool/mail
User mail spool.
[1] | Some early Unix systems had a fast, small-capacity fixed disk (containing /, the root partition), and a second drive which was larger but slower (containing /usr and other partitions). The most frequently used programs and utilities therefore resided on the small-but-fast drive, in /bin, and the others on the slower drive, in /usr/bin. This likewise accounts for the split between /sbin and /usr/sbin, /lib and /usr/lib, etc. |