On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 10:30 AM, Stephen Harris <lists at spuddy.org> wrote: > On Sat, Jun 30, 2012 at 09:56:59AM -0500, Les Mikesell wrote: > >> devices in these days of 3TB drives.... I suppose most of what /bin >> was supposed to hold and the reasons for putting it there have been >> usurped by the initrd that is normally required to boot linux, though. > > Historically for Linux /bin and /sbin were meant to hold the minimum > necessary tools to bring the rest of the filesystems online and to do > basic restores in case the thing exploded (basically, "single user mode" > tools). Everything else was meant to be in /usr. /lib requirements came > from /bin. At least that was the rationale we put into FSSTND back in the > early-mid 90s. (I'm not sure RedHat ever really followed this properly; > there's too much stuff in /bin :-)) > > With initrd and similar ramdisk boot systems these requirements have > changed and the distinction between /bin and /usr/bin has definitely > dropped. The concept really comes from the original unix, which back in the day, often had really tiny boot disks and might mount everything else over the network or use different drive types to hold the larger /usr space. And it would still be nice to be able to do that from a small flash disk, etc. But you are right, I don't think Linux ever did it correctly anyway.... -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com