[AUUG-Talk]: Solaris Filesystem Hierarchies...Questions / Musings...

[Edwin Groothuis]

On Sat, Nov 18, 2006 at 02:01:56PM +1030, David Lloyd wrote:
> 
> To make my command line experience as seemless as possible [read: I can 
> do what I'm used to doing], I have between 8-12 different locations in 
> my PATH variable.
> 
> Most of the GNU/Linux distributions seem to have much less binary 
> locations and tend to put most things in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. 
> From what I have seen of FreeBSD, there seems to a the same philosophy.
> 
> I suspect the reason why everything seems all over the place to me is that:
> 
> 1. I'm steeped in the GNU/Linux mindset
> 2. ...and a little in the FreeBSD mindset
> 
> So, I guess I'm asking:
> 
> 1. Is it just me or does Solaris put things all over the place?

You answered this question in your email earlier:

> I might add that if one installs extra official packages, such as Sun 
> Studio, you'll often find that they contain their own directories.


> 2. If it does put things all over the place, is that because of backward
>    compability issues?

Probably. It prevents other applications to overwrite the files
(binaries, libraries, scripts) for that one application.

> 3. Are other proprietary Unixes (such as AIX, HP-UX etc) setup the same?

It are more applications which do that.

For example, on my FreeBSD machine:

[/usr/local] edwin at k7>ls -al
total 162
drwxr-xr-x   25 root   wheel    512 Nov 14 09:41 .
drwxr-xr-x   21 root   wheel    512 Oct 30 23:02 ..
drwxr-xr-x    9 root   wheel    512 Nov 14 09:41 HelixPlayer
drwxr-xr-x    9 root   wheel    512 Nov  1 03:14 jdk1.5.0
drwxr-xr-x    8 root   wheel    512 Feb 28  2006 openoffice.org-2.0.1

All with symlinks and shell scripts in /usr/local/bin to point to
the right files.

Honestly, I find it a cleaner approach then just putting everything
in /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin. Big applications can do that.

Edwin
-- 
Edwin Groothuis      |            Personal website: http://www.mavetju.org
edwin at mavetju.org    |          Weblog: http://weblog.barnet.com.au/edwin/