Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split
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2007–2026One slot for every year since HN launched. Height is that year's peak points; orange marks a 100+ point or 50+ comment breakout. Select a bar to open its strongest thread.
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HN comment orderWow. As someone who was there (I know dating my self here) reading this is kind of like that scene in Sleeper where the person from the future is trying to understand artifacts from the past. So during the BSD / System V merge (project Lulu at Sun) the /opt filesystem was introduced as a way to keep 'packages' separate from 'system'. The difference between /bin and /sbin was that sbin was 'static-bin' which is to say everything in it…
I once sent out a proposal on the FreeBSD lists to merge /sbin with /bin, and /usr/sbin with /usr/bin. People were concerned that this would slow down the system, due to PATH lookups taking longer. Even when I demonstrated the opposite was true (it being faster due to fewer directories needing to be scanned), I wasn't able to get consensus. What a shame.
For quite some time it was common for workstations to have a bare-bones OS installed on their small hard drives, but for /usr to be mounted via NFS to a large server with a large disk. This also, for a long time, justified the split.
For all people that think this is still a issue: it is not: * Arch Linux: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_filesystem_hierarc... * Fedora: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove * Debian: https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge * Ubuntu: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FoundationsTeam/Specs/Quantal/UsrMer... And this is true for quite a long time. I think the last distro that did /usr merge is Debian and this is already 3 years ago. So I find surprising that people still thinks that this is a issue. The only…
The first top-level comment from each of the four biggest threads, in HN’s own order. Excerpts are shortened; open a comment for full context.
- Breakout years
- 5
- Total points
- 2372
- Total comments
- 773
100+ points or 50+ comments
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
reference only — not used in Hall rules or ranking
Every submission
| Date | Title as submitted | By | Points | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2012-01-27 | Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin splitFirst breakout · Best thread | sciurus | 857 | 151 |
| 2016-05-06 | Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split (2010) | kylerpalmer | 378 | 129 |
| 2018-11-21 | Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split | Jaruzel | 3 | 0 |
| 2020-03-18 | Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) | rohitpaulk | 398 | 105 |
| 2022-05-11 | Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)Hall induction | taubek | 534 | 231 |
| 2024-02-28 | Why the Unix/Linux directory structure is the way it is (2010) | lproven | 1 | 0 |
| 2025-03-14 | Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) | tosh | 2 | 0 |
| 2026-01-04 | Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)Latest 20+ point return | csmantle | 199 | 157 |