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by GuB-42 280 days ago
And then, there is /usr

It was supposed to be the user directory, but because someone didn't have enough space on /, it was somehow decided to put some stuff in there, so you have /usr/bin, /usr/lib, etc... But the user directories moved to /home, making /usr hold everything but user directories. Decades later, we still don't know what goes in /usr and what goes in /. In theory, what you need to boot the system should go to /, the rest goes to /usr, but in practice, there is no real rule, just don't break the scripts. Nowadays, distros tend to link one to the other in hope of making some sense without breaking too much stuff.

All that because someone was lacking disk space at some point in history.

2 comments

But do you put extra programs in /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, /opt/, ~/bin. ~/.local/bin or somewhere else entirely. Or if you're using homebrew, who the hell even knows how to make those the first choice in your PATH.
i thought /usr was a mounted shared volume for files that were static for everyone in the lab/office and the local machine machines files went in /
It should have been /shr for shared resources rather than unix shared resources (usr) to prevent people from confusing it with something related to user