On Sunday 06 January 2008 15:52, Bill Anderson wrote:
> For those of us who use UNIX, we are used to /bin
> being a symbolic link to /usr/bin

I admit it's been a while (~1999) since I last used a Unix (not Linux) 
machine, but back in the time when I did every single kind of Unix I knew 
had /bin and /usr/bin in separate places. /bin (essential commands and at 
least one shell) is required to be on the root file system, while /usr/bin 
(most other commands) might be on another file system.

Having /bin as a symlink pointing to /usr/bin would defeat this strategy; you 
could no longer have /usr on a separate file system / partition. Booting up 
the system would fail because boot scripts would not be able to use /bin/sh, 
for example.

This just raised my curiosity. Can somebody who actually has access to a 
Solaris or AIX or HP-UX machine please shed some light on this? Are the major 
Unix vendors really forcing /usr to be on the root file system?


For Linux, see also the File System Hierarchy (FHS) standard:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html



CU
-- 
Stefan Hundhammer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>                Penguin by conviction.
YaST2 Development
SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, GF: Markus Rex, HRB 16746 (AG Nürnberg)
Nürnberg, Germany
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