The filesystem store information in a hierarchical structure that has the form of a tree.
The root level of the tree is called the root directory, or virtual directory (represented by a single slash "
/").
The root directory contains all the files and directories from all the devices (physical or mount points) of the system.
Each directory can have files or other sub-directories within it.
A file or a directory that has its name beginning with the dot character ("
.")
is by default hidden and is not shown by default in the file manager (it will also be hidden if you use
ls command without the option "
-a").
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/bin: contains user commands (cp, rm, ...)
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/sbin: contains administrative commands
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/boot: contains the bootable linux kernel and boot loader configuration files
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/dev: contains files representing access points to devices
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/etc: contains administrative configuration files
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/home: contains users' home directories
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/lib: contains libraries files
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/media: mount point for devices
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/mnt: mount point for devices, disk partitions, remote filesystems
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/cdrom: mount point for cd-roms
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/proc: contains files representing system resources
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/root: root user's directory
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/run: contains applications' temporaries files
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/tmp: contains applications' temporaries files
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/usr: contains users' files (binaries, libraries, settings, documentation, ...)
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/var: contains applications' files (data, configuration, logs, ...)