File system Hierarchy Standard

From: joop schipper <joop.schipper_at_dicgroep.nl>
Date: Thu, 08 Feb 2001 11:11:55 +0100

Hi all DU friends,

A few weeks in the (D)Unix world but grown old with OpenVMS I searched for a
file system hierarchy in order to put our current and future applications a
nice place in such a way that OS and applications are easy maintainable and
distributable.
I found the FHS 2.0 standard from File system Hierarchy Standard Group
October 26, 1997. I do find this back in the OS structure but what's used as
a standard within UNIX world applications.
The general thought is a good one, nothing wrong with that, but I was
astonished about the ease the proposal mixed up the OS dir's with
application dir's. It's practically impossible to e.g. install a full new
OS. You must backup/restore on a per directory bases. Instead of using the
nice UNIX feature be able to backup/restore full file systems. So I would
have expected a fully separated OS dir's and Application dir's
Backup (vdump) the OS: just /, /usr, /var
and applications: vdump /app or separated /app/<app1>, /app/<app2> etc.
Within the /APP directory a structure to place static, variable and sharable
data etc following the FHS proposal. A /sys file system could be added for
all system like applications, think of apache, tomcat but also a Bash shell
etc.

My question is what FHS are you, (D)Unix world, using and if you are using
the FHS(2.0) standard how do you deal with the mixture. Other than patiently
waiting for the per directory backup and restore and to watchdog the users
all the time because they might create somewhere a directory not part of
your backup script.

Or... do I miss something due to my extremely lack of UNIX experience?

Thanks a lot in advance for your advises,
and kind regards,
DIC Information Consultants
Joop M. Schipper
The Netherlands
joop.schipper_at_dicgroep.nl
Received on Thu Feb 08 2001 - 10:15:08 NZDT

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