Sometimes the tar files are just archives that get extracted at /, which is a fairly primitive but functional way to distribute packages. For a description of

Sometimes the tar files are just archives that get extracted at /, which is a fairly primitive but functional way to distribute packages. For a description of the directories, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard Note that these directories do not actually have many hard and fast rules... while you can't change /proc, you can argue all you like over whether something goes in /bin or /sbin, or argue whether it should go in /usr. There are a ton of differences in the details.