5 ms·
Adding to this historical reasoning, it is to be noted that in traditional Unix, /usr was pretty much the equivalent of /home in Linux systems: the parent direc
by ntauthority 5y ago
Adding to this historical reasoning, it is to be noted that in traditional Unix, /usr was pretty much the equivalent of /home in Linux systems: the parent directory for user home directories, i.e. 'usr'.
The existence of /usr/bin can probably be explained by the reasoning that, just like nowadays Linux systems often have a really big /home partition, early Unix systems eventually ran out of space for whatever volume would hold /bin, and with 'reinstalling' not remotely as easy an option as it would be these days, storing an extra 'bin' etc. directory in the 'larger partition for user directories' became commonplace.
- ink_13 5y agoCareful, you'll attract computing historians who will want to tell you that "usr" actually stands for "UNIX system resources"
- Cockbrand 5y agoThat's how I've learned it around 1995, and that the division between /[s]bin and /usr/[s]bin has the reason that the former are required for system boot, while the latter are mounted via NFS from a central server - why waste local disk space when these would be identical for every system anyway (in a homogenous environment, at least). While that made a lot of sense to me back then, I've become aware that it might not be absolutely accurate, though.
- ntauthority 5y agoNFS is a Sun thing. If you consider Sun as the canonical historical Unix, this is still correct. Sun had a few interesting early views on networking.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- musicale 5y agoNice backronym, but /usr/ken (etc.) in v6 shows that /usr was originally a user disk. You could ask Ken Thompson (/usr/ken) himself to verify. ;-)