1 Feb
2013
1 Feb
'13
7:37 a.m.
On Jan 31, 2013, at 6:28 PM, Random832 wrote:
On 1/31/2013 7:06 PM, Jeremy C. Reed wrote:
The split was for /usr and slash. Those things in / were local on small disks needed to
boot the system just enough to mount a shared /usr remotely or to do some very limited
recovery. This is why there's both /usr/bin and /bin.
It doesn't explain the /sbin and /bin split though.
I recall from SunOS 3.x documentation that I no longer have access to that the split was
done to improve exec times for normal users. They didn't want the hash list to get
too long with all the extra stuff in /sbin and /usr/sbin. the movement of the files from
/etc also included movement to /libexec or /usr/libexec for many of the daemons that
started out life in /etc. things like ifconfig moved to /sbin where people could more
easily run them. Maybe the original /etc and /bin split was for PATH reasons?
Warner
I have heard the story a few times about sbin
split is due to disk
space, such as told at
http://www.osnews.com/story/25556/Understanding_the_bin_sbin_usr_bin_usr_sb…
http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html
Well, keeping in mind the stuff in /sbin used to be in /etc, in e.g. v7 -
it's possible the real reason is simply they wanted binaries out of /etc and
didn't want to put them in /bin where normal users might wonder "what is
this?".