figuring out the file system layout

Cow Loon

Registered
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

Do not read this sign.
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

Registered
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?
 
Top