System Hierarchy overview
By the end of this article you should be able to answer the following questions:
What is the command the displays help info about your machine's high level folder structures?
$ man hier
System Hierarchy
At it's most fundamental level, Everything in Linux is a file.
The top most folder in linux is called the root directory. This folder contains all the other folders and files. In Linux the root directory and is represent by "/". So to navigate to the root folder we do:
$ cd /
This contains the following:
$ ls -l total 98 dr-xr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Mar 9 09:33 bin dr-xr-xr-x. 5 root root 1024 Oct 15 13:14 boot drwxr-xr-x 18 root root 3480 Mar 13 10:49 dev drwxr-xr-x. 98 root root 4096 Mar 13 10:49 etc drwxr-xr-x. 3 root root 4096 Oct 15 23:54 home dr-xr-xr-x. 11 root root 4096 Dec 24 15:51 lib dr-xr-xr-x. 9 root root 12288 Mar 9 09:33 lib64 drwx------. 2 root root 16384 Oct 15 13:03 lost+found drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Sep 23 2011 media drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Sep 23 2011 mnt drwxr-xr-x. 4 root root 4096 Oct 15 23:55 opt dr-xr-xr-x 98 root root 0 Mar 13 10:49 proc dr-xr-x---. 3 root root 4096 Dec 24 16:16 root dr-xr-xr-x. 2 root root 12288 Mar 8 12:07 sbin drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Oct 15 13:03 selinux drwxr-xr-x. 2 root root 4096 Sep 23 2011 srv drwxr-xr-x 13 root root 0 Mar 13 10:49 sys drwxrwxrwt. 7 root root 4096 Mar 14 16:19 tmp drwxr-xr-x. 13 root root 4096 Oct 15 13:05 usr drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Dec 24 15:39 vagrant drwxr-xr-x. 21 root root 4096 Dec 24 15:51 var
To get a brief idea of what are stored in each of these folders, you can view the hier man pages:
$ man hier