On Sunday 06 January 2008 15:52, Bill Anderson wrote:
For those of us who use UNIX, we are used to /bin being a symbolic link to /usr/bin
I admit it's been a while (~1999) since I last used a Unix (not Linux)
machine, but back in the time when I did every single kind of Unix I knew
had /bin and /usr/bin in separate places. /bin (essential commands and at
least one shell) is required to be on the root file system, while /usr/bin
(most other commands) might be on another file system.
Having /bin as a symlink pointing to /usr/bin would defeat this strategy; you
could no longer have /usr on a separate file system / partition. Booting up
the system would fail because boot scripts would not be able to use /bin/sh,
for example.
This just raised my curiosity. Can somebody who actually has access to a
Solaris or AIX or HP-UX machine please shed some light on this? Are the major
Unix vendors really forcing /usr to be on the root file system?
For Linux, see also the File System Hierarchy (FHS) standard:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html
CU
--
Stefan Hundhammer