The Linux Hierarchy of Directories

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/bin—Contains common Linux user commands, such as ls, sort, date, and chmod.

/boot—Has the bootable Linux kernel and boot loader configuration files (GRUB).

/dev—Contains files representing access points to devices on your systems. These
include terminal devices (tty*), floppy disks (fd*), hard disks (hd*), RAM (ram*), and
CD-ROM (cd*). (Users normally access these devices directly through the device files.)

/etc—Contains administrative configuration files.

/home—Contains directories assigned to each user with a login account.

/media—Provides a standard location for mounting and automounting devices, such
as remote file systems and removable media (with directory names of cdrecorder,
floppy, and so on).

/mnt—A common mount point for many devices before it was supplanted by the standard

/media directory. Some bootable Linux systems still used this directory to mount
hard disk partitions and remote file systems.

/proc—Contains information about system resources.

/root—Represents the root user’s home directory.

/sbin—Contains administrative commands and daemon processes.

/sys (A /proc-like file system, new in the Linux 2.6 kernel and intended to contain
files for getting hardware status and reflecting the system’s device tree as it is seen by the
kernel. It pulls many of its functions from /proc.

/tmp—Contains temporary files used by applications.

/usr—Contains user documentation, games, graphical files (X11), libraries (lib), and a
variety of other user and administrative commands and files.

/var—Contains directories of data used by various applications. In particular, this is
where you would place files that you share as an FTP server (/var/ftp) or a Web server
(/var/www). It also contains all system log files (/var/log) and spool files in
/var/spool (such as mail, cups, and news).



Reference : Linux Bible 2007