Re: Why complicated directory structure in Linux

On Fri, 22 Sep 2006 03:22:28 -0700, mydejamai wrote:

Popping this question into google and Yahoo 'Why complicated directory
structure in Linux' brings up this page
http://www.biznix.org/articles/linuxdirs.html at no 8 on google and 3
on Yahoo. The article doesn't mention 'man hier' nor does the
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html document.

Perhaps your search failed because the Linux filesystem hierarchy is *not*
complicated.

If Microsoft is shitware why is Bill Gates the worlds richest man and
in a position to donate more to charity than the combined earnings of
all the pure Linux/Open Source companies?

Billy Gates earned not one single penny of his fortune by producing and
selling any product in a competitive market and he never will. He is a
monopolist and his company has been convicted of criminal abuse of that
monopoly.

He simply had a product that served many companies and people when Unix
didn't and Linux didn't exist. Is it a crime for him to have taken
advantage of the opportunity that he saw?

It is a crime to abuse one's monopoly and that was not only adjudged by
Thomas Pennfield Jackson but affirmed on appeal to all eight members of
the U.S. Court of Appeals.

But why should enshrining this concept in a license result in the
coming together of a lot of people who share such a dislike for
Microsoft's financial success? I am sure Microsoft wouldn't engender so
much hatred if they were not so financial successful.

It's not their financial success we detest; it's the methods they used to
attain that success.

IBM, Sun, HP and a host of other companies are also profit making
companies, but the likes of you don't seem to have the hatred of them
you do for Microsoft.

Perhaps because they produce good hardware and software and operate within
a competitive business environment.

Perhaps Bill Gates should donate a lot of his charity money to the
development of open source software and Linux and that would make a lot
of the likes of you happier.

I could not care less where Gates distributes his money.

Linux advocacy isn't done any favours by such attitudes. Look in any of
the Windows oriented forums and you will rarely see any such attitudes
as displayed.

I have *all* windows newsgroups blocked from my newsreader.

You did *not* ask how to perform a task. You slagged a file hierarchy
which you do not understand, one which is far more organized than that
spaghetti mess of Windows.


I did not slag it, I simply wanted to understand the rationale for
having 3 bin, usr, lib, etc directories. You also forget that Windows
originated in the main as a single user system and a lot of the design
considerations applying to Unix never got to bear on it.

Describing a carefully organized filesystem hierarchy as "complicated" is
slagging indeed.

I also never forget that Windows was and still is a single-user system
with a barely minimal multitasking functionality.

You also top-posted your response, a sure sign of one with no sense
whatever for netiquette.

Do you call needlessly insulting people netiquette?

That was not needless.

David it is understandable that you expect a lot of people to exercise
the same level of diligence in learning about machinery that you do,
but peoples choices are limited by the time at their disposal,
especially after they have devoted their spare time to worshipping at
the altar of MTV, Big Brother and Pop Idol.

Then those people should just continue to use whatever OS they are
comfortable with. They are welcome to their BSODs and malware.

Your diligence is commendable, but you don't have to slag of others
because of their different approach to technology. Are you quite
certain that in certain aspects of your life you are not as dumb as you
consider some people dumb with respect to Linux, and in those
situations don't you simply ask?

But you made no real attempt to learn any of this on your own. Even when
I was using CP/M and MSDOS I took the time to browse through the
filesystem to see what was there and how it could be used.

$ cd /usr/man/man7
$ ls
..... hier.7.gz ....

WTF is "hier"; that's the German word for "here".

$ whatis hier
hier (7) - Description of the file system hierarchy

.

Quantcast