Filesystem Hierarchy Standard Group RustyRussell DanielQuinlan 1994-2001Daniel Quinlan 2001Paul 'Rusty' Russell All trademarks and copyrights are owned by their owners, unless specifically noted otherwise. Use of a term in this document should not be regarded as affecting the validity of any trademark or service mark. Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this standard provided the copyright and this permission notice are preserved on all copies. Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this standard under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that the title page is labeled as modified including a reference to the original standard, provided that information on retrieving the original standard is included, and provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one. Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this standard into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the copyright holder. This standard consists of a set of requirements and guidelines for file and directory placement under UNIX-like operating systems. The guidelines are intended to support interoperability of applications, system administration tools, development tools, and scripts as well as greater uniformity of documentation for these systems. This standard enables Software to predict the location of installed files and directories, and Users to predict the location of installed files and directories. We do this by Specifying guiding principles for each area of the filesystem, Specifying the minimum files and directories required, Enumerating exceptions to the principles, and Enumerating specific cases where there has been historical conflict. The FHS document is used by Independent software suppliers to create applications which are FHS compliant, and work with distributions which are FHS complaint, OS creators to provide systems which are FHS compliant, and Users to understand and maintain the FHS compliance of a system. We recommend that you read a typeset version of this document rather than the plain text version. In the typeset version, the names of files and directories are displayed in a constant-width font. Components of filenames that vary are represented by a description of the contents enclosed in "<" and ">" characters, <thus>. Electronic mail addresses are also enclosed in "<" and ">" but are shown in the usual typeface. Optional components of filenames are enclosed in "[" and "]" characters and may be combined with the "<" and ">" convention. For example, if a filename is allowed to occur either with or without an extension, it might be represented by <filename>[.<extension>]. Variable substrings of directory names and filenames are indicated by "*".