figuring out the file system layout

[Cow Loon]

I haven't figure out yet the relationship between what I see in the GUI and what I see at the command line.

/Users/me/Desktop

Seems to be my desktop, but then where are the files in the hard drive(s)?

If I'm looking in the GUI can I see /usr/local/src, for example? I don't think so. What's the relationship?

 

[rharder]

We see the crashing of two paradigms. The short answer is that the hard drive in its entirety can be seen from /Volumes/MyHardDrive (or whatever you call it).

On a *nix system, everything works from "/". That's kind of like the computer itself (but only kinda). Hard drive partititions and network drives are mounted to various locations so that they appear at /Volumes or /usr/local or /opt/net or whatever.

The mixing of the Mac view where hard drives are separate entities of the *nix view that everything falls under the / directory results in the nice little /Volumes directory that ties it together.

-Rob

 

[JohnMurden]

The diff is between 'your desktop' (OS X, *Nix, NT) and 'THE desktop' (OS 9-)... your desktop is a specific folder of your user profile, not a specific folder of the OS. The desktop (/Desktop) that you see is a subset of you (/UserName), and you are a subset of alll of the users (/Users) of that computer. So, on the drive your desktop files are located in Users/(your username)/Desktop/. This all becomes more clear if you have multiple users on your machine. Another example of this is if you have Web Sharing turned on. The main website in Library/Webserver/ is what appears for your IP (or http://127.0.0.1/), but anything that you put in YOUR website (Users/(you)/Sites/) will show up at (your IP/~username) or (or http://127.0.0.1/~username). Is that what you were asking about?