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Comment by wannacboatmovie | Hacker News Reader

They might as well rename it C:/Linux/System32 while they're at it.

The separate paths were originally done for reasons but since you can't install a mainstream distro with < 512MB RAM these days (not even Alpine) some of those reasons are moot.

Linux is becoming less and less like UNIX every day.

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The original history behind a lot of original UNIX directory structure is engineers running out of disk space on a PDP-11 50 years ago and shuffling things around to keep the system operating. Other reasoning has been piled on top over the years.

Yes, and undoing this means it's no longer UNIX as it will no longer run on that PDP-11! (Unless you can afford a bigger disk I guess.)

If "being UNIX" hinges on the fucking filesystem structure I honestly am fine with it "not being UNIX"

It does, however it is actually less strict than I had in mind,

https://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/

I suspect you missed the sarcasm in Athas' comment?

A lot of thoughts [1] have been put into the usr merge, and compatibility with unix is one of them, and one other unix that has done this merge is Solaris, so Linux distros doing the merge are not even that special.

(note: it's not about merging /bin and /sbin)

[1] https://systemd.io/THE_CASE_FOR_THE_USR_MERGE/

> The separate paths were originally done for reasons

These reasons were not originally philosophical in nature: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074...

IMO, keeping /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin separate from /bin doesn’t serve any useful purpose except historical continuity. You can’t really get rid of those paths without breaking things (e.g. since /usr/bin/env is usually hardcoded in shebangs), but symlinking them together is a practical way of effectively merging them.

> > The separate paths were originally done for reasons > > These reasons were not originally philosophical in nature: http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074... > > IMO, keeping /usr/bin and /usr/local/bin separate from /bin doesn’t serve any useful purpose except historical continuity. You can’t really get rid of those paths without breaking things (e.g. since /usr/bin/env is usually hardcoded in shebangs), but symlinking them together is a practical way of effectively merging them.

The `local` does. It is were

Urgh, that's what get trying to write a comment through an app (and sadly edit time window is gone). Anyway, the `local` does. It is a manually managed sub-hierarchy, compared to rest being system managed. So `/bin` and `/usr/bin` will have executables managed through a package manager whereas `/local/bin` is were admin will put executables by themselves to be accessible by all users. Also, it's were `make install` will put its builds by default. Systemd provides a per-user similar hierarchy in `~/.local`, which has a `~/.local/bin` directory.

`/usr/local/bin` is where manually installed packages go, and I've never seen it merged to `/bin` or `/usr/bin` on any *NIX system I've ever used.

I use it all the time for custom scripts/programs I don't want the package manager to interfere with.

https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/4186/what-is-usr-lo...

I am aware of its usage, but switched to installing things into separate folders in /opt many years ago. That way, it’s easy to uninstall stuff (rm the right subfolder), and you can install apps that don’t follow the Unix conventions into the same place (e.g. Matlab).

You’re right though, I haven’t seen any mainstream distributions (i.e. no GoboLinux) that removes /usr/local.

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