Continuing Caldera Directories

Let’s move right along in this series on Caldera OpenLinux directories with a look at another 3 directories and their contents.

install@. Though you’ll find install@ in the root directory, it really isn’t a subdirectory at all. It’s a symbolic link to the scripts and files directory, located at /var/lib/LST. This link is unique to Caldera.

lib. If you’ve looked carefully through your directory tree, you’ve seen this one regardless of your distribution. This is the directory in which all the common libraries are stored. If you’re not familiar with libraries, here’s the nutshell view. Libraries are pieces of reusable code. That is, they’re written once and used over and over in different applications or scripts. The /lib directory is where these chunks of reusable code are stored and is common to all Linux distributions.

/lost+found. This is an interesting directory. Earlier on in Penguin Shell, we talked about repairing filesystems in the event of a system emergency. Programs like fsck and e2fsck are the primary filesystem repair tools. Both use the /lost+found directory to store data in the event that a filesystem repair is unsuccessful, or when a file is truncated. In that sense, the /lost+found directory is exactly as it appears - the home of files that have no home. This directory, too, is common to most Linux distributions.

We’ve got three more days with the Caldera filesystem. If you’ve got general directory structure questions that haven’t yet been answered, feel free to drop me a note. I’ll include your questions in a summary of directories at the end of this series.