• DarkMetatron
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    22
    ·
    10 days ago

    And I still don’t know what’s the point in separating /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin and /usr/sbin.

    This goes back to the olden days when disk space was measured in kilo and megabytes. /sbin/ and /usr/sbin have the files needed to start a bare bone Unix/Linux system, so that you could boot from a 800kb floppy and mount all other directories via network or other storage devices as needed.

    • tromars
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      9 days ago

      Is there a reason to keep this structure other than „we’ve always been doing it like that“/backwards compatibility?

      • DarkMetatron
        link
        fedilink
        arrow-up
        3
        ·
        9 days ago

        The structure is changing, many distributions already are merging more and more of the duplicated subdirectories in /usr/ with the counterparts in / but it takes time to complete that and at the moment those subdirectories are often still there but as symlinks to be compatible with older software (and sysadmins).