[TUHS] /bin vs /sbin

[arnold at skeeve.com]

Grant Taylor via TUHS <tuhs at minnie.tuhs.org> wrote:

> To me, this makes it fairly self evident that /sbin was originally for 
> statically linked binaries.  At least in Linux.

Dunno about that.

> Does anyone have any history of /sbin from other traditional Unixes? 
> I'd be quite interested in learning more.

/sbin and /usr/sbin came into being in the late 80s when Berkeley
and USG were standardizing on file system layouts for diskless workstations;
Sun and DEC and others were also in on this.

/sbin specifically was meant to hold the executables meant for use by
root that previously had been in /etc along with config files.
(sbin ==> super-user bin.)

The idea was that /etc held things specific to a box, while /bin, /sbin,
/usr could be remote mounted from a server.  This is also when /home
came into practice as the place to hold home directories.

This avoided having umpteen zillion copies of the same files
(executables, man pages, libraries, etc.) since they could be mounted
read-only from one or a few servers.  At the time, disk space was not
nearly as cheap as it is now.

This is also when /var came into being for log files and such;
again - it was per machine space, so it lived either on a small disk
in the workstation or on a per-client chunk of space on the server
if the client was totally diskless.

HTH,

Arnold