Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010)

Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by oftenwrong on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @09:20AM (#22616301)

Recent Debian and Ubuntu systems symlink (by default, possibly with exceptions) /bin, /sbin, and /lib* to their counterparts in /usr. Older systems may be able to perform the merge by installing the "usrmerge" package.

I believe Arch takes it further and combines /bin and /sbin (and /usr/sbin) by symlinking them to /usr/bin.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by gweinberg on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @02:11PM (#22619572)

Doesn't this seem backwards? Given that the usr prefix doesn't mean anything anymore, wouldn't it make more sense to just put everything in /bin and keep /usr/bin as a symlink for backwards compatibility and eventually drop it?

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by bonzini on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @04:05PM (#22620701)

Putting everything in a single directory allows you to mount it from a remote for system with a single mount point. /usr means "the part of the OS that is the same across all hosts".

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by gweinberg on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @08:02PM (#22622841)

Everything is always in a single directory, it's called "/". I don't see why you think the files under /usr are particularly likely to be remote mounted.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by afiori on Thursday March 19, 2020 @08:48AM (#22626911)

If you remotely mount "/" then you ran out of namespace for non-remote files.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by sjmulder on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @08:11PM (#22622899)

Isn’t that supposed to be share/ and maybe a few others? bin/ and lib/ are architecture specific.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by oat_bravo_nap on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @04:16PM (#22620800)

Here are the wiki pages for the move in Fedora and Ubuntu:

https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/UsrMove

https://wiki.debian.org/UsrMerge

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by kseistrup on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @10:28AM (#22616994)

Correct, ArchLinux symlinks /bin, /sbin and /usr/sbin to /usr/bin.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by majewsky on Thursday March 19, 2020 @05:59AM (#22626003)

Also /lib to /usr/lib.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by shrimp_emoji on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @05:41PM (#22621514)

Confirmed on Manjaro (which is Arch-based) as well.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by the_af on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @09:40AM (#22616504)

Do you know in which Ubuntu version this showed up? I just tested on my Ubuntu 16.04 (I know, I know) and they are not symlinked.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by oftenwrong on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @01:27PM (#22619044)

I believe Ubuntu started being usrmerged-by-default in 19.04 (Disco Dingo), although the release notes do not mention it.

On 16.04 you can usrmerge your system by installing the usrmerge package:

https://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/usrmerge

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by andreareina on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @11:06AM (#22617433)

18.04 here, /bin and /usr/bin are still different.

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Re:Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin, usr/sbin split (2010) by therealjumbo on Wednesday March 18, 2020 @01:06PM (#22618834)

I think it was done in Debian 10 which was released last summer. So you'll probably need a Ubuntu version newer than that.

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