[nycbug-talk] why /var?

[Isaac Levy]

Hi All,

On Feb 18, 2005, at 1:42 PM, Jay wrote:

> This is probably a theological issue, though.

Heh.  I've spent a lot of time studying userland hierarchies on various  
systems in the last year, and from what I've found historically, this  
has indeed always been a theological issue <g>.  Every notable  
variation I've seen simply has various tradeoffs, but what I've found  
interesting, is that things fundamentally haven't changed in 35+ years  
for most systems.  The lexical logic is the same- and on most systems,  
pretty easy to figure out- (i.e. I've seen veteran BSD heads not even  
flinch jumping into /Users/<homedir> on OSX- [though perhaps grumble  
about the upper-case U]).

Especially after Bob posted the Next/Cocoa logic, what I wanted to  
contribute to this thread is:

man 7 hier

A bunch of folks here likely already know about this man page, but for  
those who don't, any good unix should explain it's reasoning for it's  
userland layout.

With that, I'll post a few man pages in this thread from various boxen  
running close to me,, but the FreeBSD man page site has man hier for  
all the BSD's, and a  LOT of other platforms, here:

http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi? 
query=hier&apropos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+5.3- 
RELEASE+and+Ports&format=html

--
If you have a platform that's not there, I'd love to see the hier man  
page posted in this thread-

If you want to make a text file of a man page, it's annoying to pipe to  
file because of the reverse-line-feeds when printed on screen, here's  
the commands I used to make the files I'm posting to this thread  
(replace 'SomeUnixFilename.txt' with whatever filename you want to):

uname -a >> SomeUnixFilename.txt && man hier | col -bx >>  
SomeUnixFilename.txt

Rocket-
.ike