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RE: offtopic helmet polishing (was Re: rm fails to remove symbolic links to directories)
- From: "Dave Korn" <dave dot korn at artimi dot com>
- To: "'ask a straight question, get a .... um.... well, some kind of an answer anyway....'" <cygwin-talk at cygwin dot com>
- Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2005 17:53:13 +0100
- Subject: RE: offtopic helmet polishing (was Re: rm fails to remove symbolic links to directories)
- Reply-to: Talk Amongst Yourselves <cygwin-talk at cygwin dot com>
----Original Message----
>From: NNK_ml
>Sent: 18 April 2005 14:31
>
> Since we're on the subject...why is there a /bin and a /usr/bin? Can't
> we just dump all the program files in one place? And I was looking at
> SUSE Linux, and it had even more */bins.../bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, etc...
>
> Why...?
>
> -Neil, aka Newbness Incarnate
Well, /bin is the bin, that's a bit like /dev/null, but /usr/bin is the
user bin, that's where we throw all the user's files away when we want to
delete them. Then there's the user's local bin, which is a bit like the
recycle bin in windows. But not to be confused with the S-bin, which is
short for the system bin, that's where the system throws stuff away. Having
all these bins is great, because it means that if the system bin fills up,
users can still delete their files, and even if the user bin is full up,
each user can still use their local bin. So basically it's a
high-availability multiply-redundant fail-safe way of deleting files.
OTOH I could have been making it all up.
cheers,
DaveK
--
Can't think of a witty .sigline today....