The Unix part of my HD...

[Claruz]

Hello, I hope this topic hasn't been covered yet, if it has, I'm sorry but I didn't know what to search for.

I want to know quite simply what the default layout of the unix part of my HD should be, and how this works together with OSX. The problem is that I have for example the bin folder, which as I understand is for binary executables in at leas three places. Firstly in root, which I guess belongs to the root user and shouldn't be touched. Partly in the /usr folder which I can only guess is unix's way of saying /User/mylogin. And finally (as far as I know, there might be more ) in the /sw folder, which is where fink made it's own unix file hierarchy with all the subfolders. This is all getting very confusing and I am not sure atol where things are being run from, and where I should install things. Say I want to compile source code I downloaded from the net, it will install itself with make install, but how do I know if this is compatible with OSX and my current file hierarchy? Basically I want to know is there a way of cleaning all this mess up and having everything in their correct folders. I seem to have X-Free spread nicely over my HD too. It's very reasuring to look with the terminal to see what my HD contains and find that it's all a whole mess, and that most of the stuff probably doesn't work or has never tried to.

Wow, rambling on and on, sorry 'bout that, its late and my thoughts aren't as clear as they should be for this kind of thing. Thanks for any help you can give me on clearing this matter up.

Thanks

 

[howardm4]

Unix tends to put stuff in lots of places. You really dont want to start
moving things around too much w/o a deeper understanding of what
is where and why its there. All of X11 should be under /usr/X11R6 and /etc/X11. These are decisions made during design and/or compile time and
believe me, things start breaking in 'interesting' ways.

If your going to install stufff off the net, it almost always wants to
be in /usr/local/..................

That way, you dont corrupt/alter/change the systemwide stuff w/ your
new 'local' stuff.

Really, why do you care where it's being run from? You'll end up with a
half dozen or a dozen items in your $PATH and that'll be that. The shell
caches the contents and it really doesnt matter too much on a single user
system.

Your incorrect to think of it as the Unix part of OSX. It's all one show.
Apple just does a good job of hiding it.

Remember, there is always the 'which' and 'whereis' command.

Oh, there is /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /sbin for your binaries.