From: H. Peter Anvin Date: Sun, 08 Jan 2006 03:00:23 GMT Subject: Re: Does git belong in root's $PATH? Message-ID: <43C08047.6090701@zytor.com> In-Reply-To: walt wrote: > H. Peter Anvin wrote: > >>/usr used to be what is now called /home. What you're describing above >>is the current usage. > > History lessons are valuable for us youngsters ;o) Can you give us a > brief description of what motivated such a change? (Just as important, > of course, is whether the original motives have changed or disappeared.) > This is the history as far as I understand it. Keep in mind I was only 8 years old in 1980, and I think I first learned about how Unix worked in 1985 or 1986, so not all of this is first-hand. /usr was initially used for home directories (user directories.) Both fore reasons as have been previously discussed (remember, most easy multi-user systems were a lot friendlier than one would expect today), and because the root disk often filled up, it became common for users to put binaries in /usr/bin, and often the sysadmin, too. As the need for system security tightened, by the 80's this was a pretty unusable configuration. Since home directories were specified in /etc/passwd, those could, and often were, located elsewhere -- much easier than trying to change the now-established conventions of /usr/bin et al. A lot of systems in the 80's were massively multiuser anyway (workstations were coming in but were rare), and so you'd frequently see paths like /u2/h/hpa for example (my actual home directory location on our college server.) The convention of using /home for home directories seems to have evolved out of necessity when networking came in use on a large scale (NFS, automounter, etc), probably in the late 80's-early 90's. By the time Linux emerged in 1991 it was pretty well-established on smaller systems; larger systems still tended to use local conventions inherited from previous generation systems. -hpa