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35 points

I always thought /usr was for “user”… TIL

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11 points

It did, let me explain:

On the original (ie Thompson and Ritchie at Bell in 1969-71), I think it was a PDP-11, they installed to a 512kb hard disk.

As their “stuff” grew they needed to sprawl the OS to another drive, so they mounted it under /usr and threw OS components that didn’t fit.

https://landley.net/writing/unixpaths.pdf

I’ve done the same, outgrew so you mount under a tree to keep going, it just never became a historical artifact.

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22 points

It is, this infographic is wrong. Or I guess technically some other standard could define it like the infographic, but the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard defines it as a secondary hierarchy specifically for user data.

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5 points
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/usr used to be the user home directory on Unix…well most of them. I think Solaris/SunOS has always been /export/home as I recall.

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2 points

Huh. I did as well. Like /use/bin was for user installed applications and such. You learn something everyday.

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