The Linux Directory Tree

  1. Using the Linux Command Line
  2. The Linux Directory Tree
  3. Linux Shells and Basic Commands
  4. Changing Passwords
  5. Your Home Directory
  6. User Information
  7. Linux User Default Files
  8. Linux User Profiles and Paths
  9. sudo and su –
  10. Listing Files and Going Deep Into Filesystems
  11. Linux: Creating and Deleting Directories and Files

Let’s be clear: the structure of directories in any OS is a directory tree. You, I and everyone will want to call it a “file system.” That’s okay, and the other kids usually won’t laugh at you. But formally, a file system is the formatting that’s applied to a partition, like FAT32 or NTFS in Windows, or EXT3 in Linux.

Linux (and Unix and Mac) use slashes to separate directories:

/

Windows does things backwards, and uses the backward slash, which we won’t call a back(ward) slash. The cool kids call it a “whack.”

\

Think like a developer. We want a root for the file system (it uses a tree metaphor, sort of), which will be / .

Now we need a folder for all our binaries, because that’s what programming is all about, right? Writing executable binaries? So it’s /bin . You can think of this as being similar to the C:\Program Files folder in Windows.

Consider further:

/

/bin

/sbin

/lib

/var

/tmp

/proc

/mnt or /media

/usr

/opt