I’m kinda a newbie to linux (…going on 20 years now, slow learner). I recently came across tldr and don’t know how I lived without it, because man pages can be a little much for a non technical person.

Is there a helpfile / command to learn the purpose of the current root directory you are in? I’ve been reading a few books on Linux at the library, and everything about it kinda fascinates me, and I can’t stop asking questions trying to learn about it…

My current question is what is /etc/skel/ . It’s an empty directory and it has some purpose. Is there a tool to query what the purpose of this directory is? Like whatis . or something like that, for educational purposes; rather than having to web search/“google” it everytime.

  • SolidGrue@lemmy.worldEnglish
    15·
    9 months ago

    This is a pretty quick read with a bit of context for each entry.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard

    (edit: similar content as man hier but with some more historical context and callouts to.other references)

    One thing that’s important to understand about Linux and its *NIX pedigree is its history of compromises later overcome by Moore’s Law and its variants.

    UNIX, its precursors, and its derivates has been around for something 50 or 55 years, essentially congealing in Bell Labs and evolving from there. It was conceived and developed when EVERYTHING about computing was expensive in both dollars, cycles and cooling. The zeitgeist of the era emphasized small, efficient operations that did one thing and did it well, reusing as Mich existing code as possible because storing anything extra was more expensive.

    The filesystem itself is a study in value engineering, from economizing on the number of bytes in file paths (knowing linkers store that information in symbol tables) to optimizing system images to the most common storage media sizes of the day. The evolution of /bin, /lib, /etc, /sbin, /usr/* and even /home are just interesting reads if you’re into deep lore and arcana.

    Hope you have fun exploring it, its a dying body of knowledge

    • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.meEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      For more context, those UNIX would run on machines that were the size of a large room, if not an entire floor.

      And you’d input and get output on a TeleTYpewriter. The video terminals came later. Sometimes you’d dial into them over 300 baud modem. Even just ls / could take a significant amount of time to output if the names were super long, let alone the paper and ink ribbon consumption. And you’d be lucky to even have 80 column output, you’d often have 40 or even less.

      DOS came two decades later and still had that 8.3 format because you’d use 5¼ floppies with 320k of space.

  • DasFaultier@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    9·
    9 months ago

    Not exactly what you’re looking for, but for an understanding of the general directory structure in Linux, you might want to have a look at the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard (FHS 3.0). It defines which directories need to exist and what they are supposed to contain. Also, it’s a rather light read and not awfully technical.

    If you want more of a deeper dive, you might want to get a book that can be used in preparation for an LPIC-1-certification, even if you never intend to take the actual test. I found that they do a really good job at teaching not just the user perspective of Linux (type this to do that), but also the reasoning behind why Linux works the way it does.

  • metiulekm@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    4·
    9 months ago

    Regarding /etc/skel being an empty directory, note that it is one of the few places outside /home where you can actually expect hidden files :) On my Arch it contains Bash dotfiles, for example.