Re: [opensuse] odd /usr/bin thing

Aaron Kulkis wrote:
Bill Anderson wrote:
Bob S wrote:
Hello SuSE users,

While searching for files in /usr/bin I noticed something that seems odd to me. There is a folder in there named X11. It is a link to the same folder. If you open it, it shows the exact same thing as /usr/bin. You can continue opening the X11 directory until you have a /usr/bin//X11/X11/X11/X11 file open on ad-infitum. They all show the exact same files and megabytes. What is this? Can somebody explain the purpose?

Bob S
Not sure of the reason, but it only impacts on the logical path pwd -L. The physical path (pwd -P) remains as /usr/bin. The impact is to have all X11 binaries appear in /usr/bin instead of /usr/bin/X11. Like many symbolic links, it makes the applications happy even when the underlying structure changes. For those of us who use UNIX, we are used to /bin being a symbolic link to /usr/bin,

since when? there are several programs which have always
been in /bin because they are needed in runlevel 0 and
run level S, neither of which have /usr mounted, but which
are not administrative only, (and thus do NOT reside in
/sbin or /usr/sbin).

examples being: cp, chown, dd, grep, awk, cat, chmod, chgrp,
date, kill, ln, ls, mount, umount, rm, rmdir, sed, stty,
tar, shells (sh/ksh/csh/tcsh/bash), false, true, uname,
ed, ex, vi

And others depending on vendor/distribution.


> and a bunch of other symbolic links
to reflect a change in the structure of the file system hierarchy.

Bill Anderson
WW7BA



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