At 02:40 PM 09/07/2001 -0700, you wrote: >I'm overwelmed with the combination of newness and >choice in this Linux world, although it's generally >what I hoped for and I assume that it will just take >time. > >But one thing that I think is getting in my way is the >file system structure. First, I can't identify what >kind of file something is by its extension. Linux files actually don't have extensions (or at least not the 3 character extensions that dos is famous for), unless they are shell scripts (typically .sh), web files (usually .php, .html, or .css), image files (.gif, .jpg, .png), audio files (.mp3 or possibly .ogg), or archives (.tar.gz, .tgz, .bz2, or .zip) Second, I >don't know what kinds of files belong in etc say, or >bin, or whichever. If it's an executable, should be be >in home/bin, user bin, home/peter, ...? /etc is typically used for system initialization scripts (/etc/rc.d/*), configuration files (.*rc and *.conf, and sometimes conf.*), and home directory skeletons for the useradd command (/etc/skel/*). Executables are placed into many directories, which include /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, /opt, and sometimes under /usr/X11/bin and /home/$user/bin. /usr/local is the suggested place for software that you've compiled yourself from source .tar.gz or .tgz files, although some people also place this under /home/$user/bin . /usr/X11 is usually used only for GUI based Xwindows programs (not always true, but usually), while the other bin directories (/bin,/usr/bin,/usr/sbin, and /sbin) usually contain command line oriented programs. Then you have /var which contains log files for various servers (/var/log) and spools stuff for various servers (such as incoming and outgoing e-mail and so forth -- /var/spool), and which sometimes contains the web server root directory (/var/www/) /tmp is a global temporary directory, /dev is a directory with a lot of device files (stuff you don't want to delete), /root is the super-user's home directory. And what is >Lib? I thought at first that this was a library >section for documents, but see that it seems to be for >certain kinds of executables (files that other files >need?) /usr/lib and any other lib directories contain library (.so) files which allow you to run other programs. They are roughly equivalent to window .dll files. Docs are available for most everything -- they can be found under /usr/doc, or /usr/share/doc or you can visit the linuxdoc.org website which has all the HOWTo's, guides, and FAQs you could really ever want to read. If you want reading beyond that, I'm sure there are a lot of people on list that can suggest a number of books to read. Michael -- Michael Viron Registered Linux User #81978 Senior Systems & Administration Consultant Web Spinners, University of West Florida
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