FHS Principles

The FHS is based on the current practices of the Linux and BSD communities. It also draws on the filesystems of other OS's and other applicable standards.

The FHS defines two orthogonal categories of files.

Shareable data is data that can be shared between multiple hosts, Unshareable data can't. So /home is normally shareable, while /dev normally isn't, and device lock files (/var/lock) can never be shared.

Static data is data that dosn't change without the system administrators intervention. Variable data is anything else that does.

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

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Andrae Muys
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