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Comment by jvehent | Hacker News Reader

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jvehent

- Where do I put my binaries ?

in /usr/bin of course

- But it's kinda personal stuff...

so put it in /usr/local/bin

- Oh right, but now I have more stuff that's not really important but still useful

that's what we have /opt for

- but... what if it's optional and only on my machine

oh hell, just create /opt/local/bin and be done with it already!

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You missed `/bin/`, `/sbin/`, `/usr/bin/`, `/usr/sbin/` and the same in `/usr/local`. Luckily there are some efforts to clean this up: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove

And ~/bin as well.

etc

I think I would actually be happy with a ~/etc. Dotfiles in the home directory needs to stop being a thing.

As opposed to windows where the user binaries are not located in a central location, I'd take this any day of the week.

You can't blame *nix for having too much choice. Especially when it's coherent.

I actually find unix worse here, as I rarely care about where the binary is (and `which` will happily tell me on the rare occasions that I do), but I often need to find various supporting files. Are they in /usr/share? /usr/local/share? /opt/fooprog? (in the olden days /usr/X11R6/share, or many other variants).

There are efforts to fix this. In Arch Linux, all binaries are now in /usr/bin, and /bin is just a symlink to /usr/bin.

That's not my problem. My problem is: Where is the template file for xyz, or the doc, or the example config, or ...

What are the equivalent locations for windows ? Also almost all programs installed via the package manager will use the same paths. If you are installing a package manually, then things get more.. interesting.

Practically universally: C:/Program Files/FooProg

In fairness, program files, templates, docs, settings, and examples on Windows are often in some mix of

  C:/Program Files (x86)/VendorName/FooProg
  C:/Users/Me/AppData/Local/FooProg
  C:/Users/Me/My Documents/FooProg/
  C:/VendorName/FooProg (I'm looking at you, AMD)
  The registry (which is sorta like /etc, and often abused to store stuff like recent searches, etc)

Linux is definitely worse on that front I agree, but let's not pretend Windows is super-consistent about file locations. I only say this after much frustration recently trying to find things.

Is it coherent? I think the whole point of that post was that it's not obvious where things should go and different people have different opinions on that. For a newcomer, learning the Linux filesystem takes years and can never truly be perfected for the above reasons.

It takes a few days. Even less if you read the specifications. Years seems unreasonably high.

It would take days to learn where things are supposed to go, in the opinion of the person writing the documentation. Where things actually go in the real world varies from distro to distro and application to application. And just when you think you have it down, you try to find where that new app just installed to, and you begin the process again.

And when you finally figure it out, Fedora moves everything to /usr.

But even /opt/local/bin (a construct I’ve never seen…) is just one letter longer than ‘Program Files’ – so at least they got the "not too long" bit right.

`Program Files` would actually be `C:\Program Files` (or the equivalent) if you're going for an absolute path. So `/opt/local/bin` comes out to two letters shorter.

Hence ‘even’, saying that even the full path is only one letter longer than the single directory name. :)

Though, really, I have never seen /opt/local/bin – /usr/bin for package-manager owned stuff, /usr/local/bin for stuff not owned by the package manager and /opt/<Vendor> for weird things…

/opt/local/bin contains no spaces and thus doesn't require quoting or escaping and is thus more than two shorter in actual use.

wasn't /usr the original /home? as I understand it, it grew and became a system directory. with /bin as the original bin.

On FreeBSD, /home is actually a symlink to /usr/home

ahhhhh, so /usr/bin isn't the recycle bin...

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