On Tue, Mar 22, 2005 at 02:40:17PM -0500, George Adkins wrote:
> >sbin == system binaries (i.e. used for managing the system)
> >
> >/sbin - ones that need to be there for bootup
> >/usr/sbin - ones that can wait until after /usr is mounted
> >            (back when people used to make / it's own partition).
> 
> "Back When" ????
> 
> Uhh..  EVERY machine (Except the SGI machines running XFS) I have has a 
> separate /usr from /, in fact they all have separate (partitions or 
> drives) /var, /usr, /home, /usr/pkgsrc...

Look.  Lots of different people and vendors do lots of different
things.  Both Linux and Solaris used to advocate having one partition
(/) and sticking everything into that.  You'd never need to repartition,
because all the disk space was available there.

> this is *basic* to how you lay out a reliable Unix system.  Everything 
> in one big / slice is BAD, otherwise, why is there even an /etc/fstab?  
> or are you guys planning on deprecating *that* too?

That seems a little reactionary to me.  Nobody is advocating that, at
least in what I saw, just saying that some people choose to run
their systems that way.

> /sbin is for the important tools that need to be statically linked 
> (notice the 's' in the beginning of 'sbin'?) so that if you bring the 
> system up in single-user mode, you have some tools that *actually work* 
> for recovering a down system, or adding disks, or moving filesystems 
> around on to different disks, etc...

No, it isn't.

On NetBSD, /rescue is your collection of statically linked binaries,
with which to do system recovery.  Under Solaris, /sbin == statically
linked binaries.

/sbin == sysadmin tools (needed with a separate /usr partition)
/bin  == user tools (needed with a separate /usr partition)

/usr/sbin and /usr/bin are more of the same, just on the /usr partition.

The separation of stuff into /, /etc, /sbin, /bin, /usr/sbin, and
/usr/bin was spelled out in the 4.3Reno docs.  Try "man hier" for more
(authoritive) information.

-Kurt