Continuing Caldera Directories

b>Continuing Caldera Directories

We’re moving right along in the review of Caldera OpenLinux directories. With just a few days left, it’s important to remember that Caldera both conforms to the Filesystem Hierarchy Standanrd and deviates a bit from it. Our look into the Caldera structure is a means to explore both the similarities and the differences.

/mnt. The /mnt directory is a common mount point for other file systems. While this was a common directory in most Linux distrubutions until a few years ago, many have opted to give these mount points a name that’s more easily recognized. For instance, several now use the /win directory for mounting a Windows partition. In any case, /mnt is the point at which such devices as you CDROM will be mounted. The command

    mount -t iso9660 /dev/hdd /mnt/cdrom

will mount the cdrom located at /dev/hdd using the iso9660 filesystem (data CDs) on /mnt/cdrom.

/opt. /opt is the “options” directory, named as such because it contains the optional (add-on) applications for you Linux system. This isn’t a directory that’s common to all Linux distributions, though it does exist in some other than Caldera. Where this directory is present, it’s used for installation of all third-party applications.

/proc. We’ve talked about /proc in earlier Penguin Shells. It’s a special filesystem that actually turns out to be an abstraction of the running processes on your system. In other words, it really isn’t a file. By acting as an interface to the kernel and its data structures, /proc can provide useful information into the current operation of your system. This directory is common to all Linux systems.

Tomorrow, we’ll look at /root, /sbin and /tmp, three more directories that find a home in all Linux distributions.