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No, usr is not "user", it means Universal System Resources, learn that already people.
It used to do /home's job, too. Now, it's for user space resources but distros like Fedora don't differentiate anyway. /bin, /sbin, /lib, and /lib64 all link to their /use equivalent anyway.
Why is having /usr/sbin separate from /bin useful? Can you elaborate? I cannot think of a use case.
There's a number of reasons why you want separate directories, some are historical, some are practical, some are security related.
This is why OpenBSD has a more or less strict separation of their directory hierarchy: (it's from the Wayback machine because for some strange reason man.openbsd.org is unreachable for me)
Seriously people, can you not do basic research? Have you NO curiosity as to where the standards, practices, and procedures your hardware and OSes use come from? Use your head for something other than growing hair.
Once you learn the basics the problems with merging /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin should become glaringly obvious. Fedora is literally bleeding edge Linux desktop development - treat it as such. RedHat certainly does. File hierarchy layouts matter and this is still a bad idea for any Unix derivative in the past and in the future regardless of storage resources that are "cheap and readily available". In order to merge root level and deeper level hierarchical directories all dependencies for those files must be met including the correct permissions, descriptors, and attributes some of which are set at the filesystem mount option level. While many standalone desktops lump everything on a couple of partitions, that's not the case with servers, remote deployment images for desktops/workstations, sometimes even IoT depends on centralized image deployment. Much of this is about deployment, management, and security strategies beyond mimicking Windows "stuff everything on C: (Windows' equivalent to the root partition)" which is a very naive approach and always has been. Not everyone wants or needs Kubernetes containerized deployments, virtualization images, or naive bare metal layouts.
No, usr is not "user", it means Universal System Resources, learn that already people.
Actually, originally /usr was for user home dirs. Then sometime back in the dinosaur age of Unix they ran out of space in their root disk, and started stuffing crap under /usr which was on a separate physical disk. And we've been stuck with it ever since.
The "Unix (Universal?) System Resources" is just a backronym someone came up with to retroactively justify the above hack.
Too late for that, it's been largely irrelevant following community initiatives like /usr merge.
Plus, being too up for interpretation did more harm than good in terms of portability.
Yeah, I think the FHS was too much of a compromise for anybody to be really happy to completely adhere to it. And as time went on, the whole multiuser POSIXy-*nixy business mattered less. Ok, so binaries & system maintenance binaries... that kind of makes sense, then user installable (but not per-user) binaries & then maintenance tools. Then local user installable... but not per-user... yeah. Too much hierarchy here. Especially when it was not set in stone.
There's a number of reasons why you want separate directories, some are historical, some are practical, some are security related.
This is why OpenBSD has a more or less strict separation of their directory hierarchy: (it's from the Wayback machine because for some strange reason man.openbsd.org is unreachable for me)
Seriously people, can you not do basic research? Have you NO curiosity as to where the standards, practices, and procedures your hardware and OSes use come from? Use your head for something other than growing hair.
Once you learn the basics the problems with merging /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, and /usr/sbin should become glaringly obvious. Fedora is literally bleeding edge Linux desktop development - treat it as such. RedHat certainly does. File hierarchy layouts matter and this is still a bad idea for any Unix derivative in the past and in the future regardless of storage resources that are "cheap and readily available". In order to merge root level and deeper level hierarchical directories all dependencies for those files must be met including the correct permissions, descriptors, and attributes some of which are set at the filesystem mount option level. While many standalone desktops lump everything on a couple of partitions, that's not the case with servers, remote deployment images for desktops/workstations, sometimes even IoT depends on centralized image deployment. Much of this is about deployment, management, and security strategies beyond mimicking Windows "stuff everything on C: (Windows' equivalent to the root partition)" which is a very naive approach and always has been. Not everyone wants or needs Kubernetes containerized deployments, virtualization images, or naive bare metal layouts.
I have never once in my long career seen a server with a more complicated partition layout than a home computer. It is at most 3 partitions: EFI (boot), root, swap or maybe even 4 if you're slapping in some extra drives for whatever role the server is performing e.g. /var/lib/whatever for db server. Before EFI, it was common to see just 2 partitions. It doesn't make sense anymore. Red Hat knows this and knows their customer requirements, and having 4 separate places for binaries which should be exec'd by CLI just isn't it for 99.99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999999999% people.
Last edited by AlanTuring69; 24 December 2023, 05:31 PM.
it should also be needs to be modified, it became almost too old for new linux systems . Afaik 3.0 released in 2015 and it has only /run addition to 2.3 ( released 2004 )
I have never once in my long career seen a server with a more complicated partition layout than a home computer. It is at most 3 partitions...
That suggests you've never run anything that is anything more than a home desktop computer or a throwaway instance in a Virtual Machine or some self-contained containerised point-n-click system.
And then there are a multitude of servers that run Linux that run the Internet...
I like the separation. Dunno why this push is being made... there may be good rationales for it, but... old habits die hard. It is useful if you ask me.
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