Re: [TUHS] /bin vs /sbin

On Tue, Jul 21, 2020 at 12:33:25PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote: Yeah, that's definitely not right. /sbin had been around for "essential system binaries" long before Linux, and Linux took it from there. You can see this from the Linux Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (earlier named fsstnd, which specified /sbin as "essential system binaries"). SunOS used that nomenclature and the GNU tools all used /sbin for that purpose. The other thing I'd again urge is that you not take HJ Lu's boot/root disks as being influencial after early 1992. The Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) released their "MCC Interim Linux" distribution in February 1992, and it was so much more convenient than HJ's boot/root disk that it very quickly swept the field. MCC was succeeded by TAMU, Yggdrasil, SLS, Slackware, and by '94 you started seeing names like Debian, Red Hat, Caldera, SuSE, etc. that would be recognizeable today. Xiafs and ext2 date from '93, and so by that point while HJ was still producing his distribution, most Linux users were using other distributions. So whatever choices HJ may have made should not be considered as being representative of what "Linux" was doing at that time. Well, /bin and /sbin contained those binaries which would be needed so you could *mount* /usr from a server. /bin would be in normal users' PATH; while /sbin would have those binaries which only root could profitably use. So /bin/sh, /bin/cat, etc., because users and root needed to use those binaries. But /sbin/ifconfig and /sbin/route because they were primarily only useful if you were root. I'll also note that MIT Project Athena had architected a scheme using Remote Virtual Disk (essentially a network block device) so that large numbers of workstations (mostly MicroVaxen, but also some IBM PC/RT's) could share /usr mounted over RVD. This was documented in Professor Saltzer's Project Athena Technical Plan dated November 1986[1]. [1] http://web.mit.edu/saltzer/www/publications/athenaplan/e.3.1.pdf Cheers, - Ted