Filesystem Hierarchy

Take me to the Video Tutorial

In this section, lets take a look at the filesystem hierarchy

Linux uses single rooted, inverted tree like file system
- /home : It is the location that contains the home directories for all users, except the root user (root user home directory is located at /root)
- /opt : If you want to install any third party programs put them in the /opt filesystem.
- /mnt : It is the default mount point for any partition and it is empty by default. It is used to mount filesystems temporarly in the system
- /tmp : It is used to store temporary data
- /media : All external media is mounted on /media
- /dev : Contains the special block and character device files
- /bin : The basic programs such as binaries cp, mv, mkdir are located in the /bin directory
- /etc : It stores most of the configuration files in Linux.
- /lib : The directory /lib and /lib64 is the place to look for shared libraries to be imported into your program
- /usr : In older systems, /usr directory is used for User Home Directories, however in the modern linux operating systems it is the location where all user land applciations in their data reside
- /var : It contains variable data like mails, log files

To print all the mounted filesystems, run df (disk filesystem) command

$ df -hP