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Re: offtopic helmet polishing (was Re: rm fails to remove symbolic links to directories)


On Mon, Apr 18, 2005 at 05:53:13PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
>>From: NNK_ml
>>Sent: 18 April 2005 14:31
>
>>Since we're on the subject...why is there a /bin and a /usr/bin?  Can't
>>we just dump all the program files in one place?  And I was looking at
>>SUSE Linux, and it had even more */bins.../bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, etc...
>>
>>Why...?
>>
>>-Neil, aka Newbness Incarnate
>
>Well, /bin is the bin, that's a bit like /dev/null, but /usr/bin is the
>user bin, that's where we throw all the user's files away when we want
>to delete them.  Then there's the user's local bin, which is a bit like
>the recycle bin in windows.  But not to be confused with the S-bin,
>which is short for the system bin, that's where the system throws stuff
>away.  Having all these bins is great, because it means that if the
>system bin fills up, users can still delete their files, and even if
>the user bin is full up, each user can still use their local bin.  So
>basically it's a high-availability multiply-redundant fail-safe way of
>deleting files.
>
>
>OTOH I could have been making it all up.

I think this sums things up pretty nicely.

OTOH, I may not actually have read it all that closely.

cgf


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