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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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What is the /opt directory? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've seen a lot of self-hosted software wanting to store their data in /opt, is there any reason why?

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 8 months ago (4 children)

/home is deprecated?

[–] [email protected] 15 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

I was wondering about that too... According to the spec:

/home is a fairly standard concept, but it is clearly a site-specific filesystem. The setup will differ from host to host. Therefore, no program should assume any specific location for a home directory, rather it should query for it.

Sometimes home directories are in other locations. My University used to have different mount points for different graduating classes on our Unix servers. And I use "/home2" for one of my servers for... reasons.

Though I'm not sure that qualifies as "deprecated"? I get the "non-standard" bit though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 7 months ago

You also have to consider that roots homedir is in /root and not home, so if you'd just assume it's /home/$USER you'd get in trouble when your programm is run or compiled as root.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

How about $HOME, is it standardized?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago (1 children)

$HOME is a shell variable, created by the shell as it starts, reading from the /etc/passwd file. It's a string, not a symlink or anything.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

I mean about the 'should query for it' part.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

For the currently logged-in user it's fine, yes. It should always be set.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago (2 children)

That's what I was wondering as well?

If so, what's the "correct" location to store stuff like documents, downloads, configurations, etc.?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

In the user's home directory, which may or may not be in /home/username.

grep username /etc/passwd will show you the home directory for a user. Also ~username from the CLI will resolve to that user's home directory. e.g. cp file.txt ~username/Documents/

[–] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

So i checked the fhs. Doesn't say it is deprecated. V3 just mentions XDG and glib (the probable sources of such claims).

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

My best guess is that having programs treat a user's home directly as a location for things like config files is deprecated. Programs should be following the XDG standard instead.

You could contact the author (their email address is in the image), but I'm too lazy to do that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

The legend seems confusing to me. I think it's trying to say that /home is non-standard. Notice that the description for /var/run explicitly states it's deprecated, and has a solid border.