From LQWiki

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard or FHS specifies a directory structure for UNIX-like systems. It was orginially created to ease development of software that needs to run on different Linux distributions and other UNIX-like systems. It defines the common UNIX-like directories and for which they are supposed to be used. It also defines a couple extra Linux specific directories.

One of the goals of the FHS is separation of shareable and unshareable on one hand and separation of static and variable files on the other. The rationale behind it is ease of mounting (read only), backup.

	shareable	unshareable
static	/usr /opt	/etc /boot
variable	/var/mail /var/spool/news	/var/run /var/lock

See also

• Mdirs
• Linux Standard Base

External links

• The specification (www.pathname.com)