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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Obviously there's also a truckload of ways AmigaOS is *different* from
> Unix. [There are no device files, pathnames have a syntax more like
> MS-DOS, configuration is always stored in binary files not text files...]
Ah. OK. I was looking at AmigaOS as the software and how you interface
to the operating system. I wasn't looking at AmigaOS as the
command-line commands that come with AmigaOS.
I mean, really, CP/M had "more" and "type" and such.
> Now I would suspect that would tend to break horribly as soon as some
> new application is added that expects everything to be in the normal
> locations...
That would be where the symlinks come into it. :-)
> [Basically I have absolutely no clue how the traditional Unix file
> layout is supposed to work. I don't know why, for example, we have /bin,
> /root/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/share/bin...]
Legacy, and the fact that way too many programs hard-coded file paths
instead of the OS doing something like providing APIs for finding out
such stuff or having some efficient central storage like a registry. Of
course, the #! syntax *requires* hard-coded paths in every file, so it's
kind of difficult to improve easily in that sense.
You started out with two disk drives: the root, and the users'
directories. But they were small, so you wound up putting things like
the mail spool on the user disk (hence, /usr/spool) and things like
executables you don't need before the system is booted enough to mount a
second disk someplace like /usr/bin. And there were executables that
only the administator could run anyway, so to cut down the number of
directories everyone else had to search, you put those in /sbin and
/usr/sbin, depending on whether they were the kind that needed the
drives mounted or not. (Check a file system: better be on the root.
Delete a user: Didn't need to be on the root.)
Then you had network-shared file systems, so you needed /usr/share as a
place to mount that, and /var as a place that you could refer to with a
common name but was actually different storage on each machine.
Then /usr got so overused for everything that it didn't make sense to
actually put, you know, users there. So you got /home or any of a
half-dozen variations on that.
Nowadays, it looks like this, mostly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_hierarchy_standard
> They had trouble. Somebody walked past and the T-adaptor on their PC
> fell apart, breaking the ring.
They set up the ring wrong, then. :-) Each loop is supposed to go back
to the hub that detects a broken connection and bypasses it.
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
"That's pretty. Where's that?"
"It's the Age of Channelwood."
"We should go there on vacation some time."
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