Noob Question Thread: Ask Any Questions About Linux!

Cyclohexane@lemmy.mlmod to Linux@lemmy.ml – 314 points –

I thought I'll make this thread for all of you out there who have questions but are afraid to ask them. This is your chance!

I'll try my best to answer any questions here, but I hope others in the community will contribute too!

447

You are viewing a single comment
View all comments

What's the difference between /bin and /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin from an architectural point of view? And how does sbin relate to this?

There's a standard. /usr was often a different partition.

/bin - system binaries
/sbin - system binaries that need superuser privileges
/usr/bin - Normal binaries
/usr/sbin - normal binaries that require superuser privileges
/usr/local/bin - for executables that aren't 'packaged' - i.e., installed by you or some other program system-wide

What is a binary?

Actually binaries can include non-executable files as well! Strictly speaking, a "binary" refers to pretty much any file that's not plain-text (so if you tried to open a binary in a text editor, you'd see gibberish).

Executable programs! Bin-ary instructions for the computer to perform!

Also, technically these will not just have binaries. I should have said executable, really, because scripts are there, too.

Former FreeBSD user here. I always kept /usr separate, including /usr/home