[NCLUG] UNIX file system question

[Rick Gaudette]

Hi Tim,

/usr/local is one of the most common places to put locally added
software.  I've seen plenty  of different but less common ones such as
/opt or /site etc but every installation I have seen has a /usr/local
for such a use.

Rick

On 7/29/07, Tim Swanson <swanson at cs.colostate.edu> wrote:
> Hi all.
>
> My name's Tim Swanson. I'm a grad student at CSU and just signed up for this
> list. I hope to attend some of the meetings starting in August, and wanted to
> introduce myself. I've got kind of a basic question to start off with.
>
> (I'm running Ubuntu 7.04, if it makes a difference.)
>
>
> I'm setting up a Java development environment on my machine, and have gone
> about installing all of the usual suspects for Java development: Eclipse, Ant,
> the SDK itself, etc. All of this was done using the package manager. I'm
> perfectly happy to let the OS take care of the details of where and how to
> install packages.
>
> However, I'm also using several Java applications and APIs that are basically
> "extract and use" style installations. (Using the Jena API, for instance,
> basically involves putting its JARs in your classpath.) Because my machine is
> multiple-user (really just myself several times, but with different setups), I
> don't want to put any of this code in user space (/home/username/**). I'd like
> to put it somewhere where it will be shared amongst all users.
>
> I don't want to stick it somewhere that the package manager uses, because I
> don't like the idea of having package-manager managed file space being mixed
> in with manually managed file space (since any uninstalls or upgrades will
> obviously have to be done manually). It just doesn't seem very clean.
>
> So I thought about creating a new directory under /home. I thought about
> creating a new directory under /usr or /usr/local (called "java_apps" or
> something similar). But then I started wondering what the UNIX-y way to do
> this was. So I thought I'd ask the list.
>
> Is there a portion of the standard UNIX file system that is set aside for
> manually installed programs that are meant to be globally accessible?
>
> Also, what is /usr/local for? (In my system there's nothing in it.)
>
> Sorry to use so much space on such a simple question. A part of me says that
> I'm being silly, and that I should just stick it in user space, make it
> globally accessible, and be done with it, but I'm curious more than anything
> else. Any ideas/suggestions? Any pointers to an online description of the
> various components of the UNIX file system?
>
>
> Thanks,
> Tim Swanson
>
>
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