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. -- rgds Stephen