Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
An example of how this works is the
/media
folder. By default, if you plug a
USB drive into your Raspberry Pi, Raspbian will automatically create a folder
inside
/media
. This folder will represent the contents of your USB drive. If you
have more than one storage device attached, they will all appear in
/media
.
A simple way to think about this is described in the Linux Documentation
"On a UNIX system, everything is a file; if something is not a file, it is a process."
There are many different directories in a modern Linux distribution such as Raspbian
that are required for it to operate. These are detailed in the following table:
Directory
Description
/
The root of the Linux filesystem.
/bin
This contains programs required to boot and use Raspbian.
/dev
All the devices attached to our Raspberry Pi are available here.
The devices are represented as special files, for example
sda1
and
null
.
/etc
This contains the configuration files for all the different
software packages.
/home
Every user in the system has a folder in
/home
. This helps you
keep each user's folders together.
/lib
Software libraries contain shared code that is shared between
multiple applications. These files end in
.so
and are stored in
this folder.
/mnt and /media
Any other filesystems that are attached to the Raspberry Pi are
available inside these folders.
/opt
Software that is not installed by default with Raspbian will
often be installed in this folder.
/proc
All the files inside the
/proc
folder are special files that allow
access to various statistics and configurations in the Linux
kernel.
/sbin
Any software applications that are used by system
administrators to manage the system are stored inside this
folder.
/tmp
Any temporary files that are used in the running of Raspbian
are normally stored in
/tmp
. These files are normally deleted
on reboot.
/usr
Any application that a normal user would install or use
are installed inside this folder with their libraries and
documentation.
