Post #3794622

2026-07-13 22:02 UTC

Why /usr and /usr/local? Once upon a time, Unix ran on ancient computers that had small hard drives, and only supported so big a drive. So they put one drive on /, where the system was installed, and one on /usr for the user's stuff. So why /usr/local? Well, after a while, Unix gained support for having /usr be a drive mounted over the network; /usr/local was implemented to be a drive that's intended to be local to the machine. Your PATH would override whatever was in /usr (the network drive) with whatever was in /usr/local. Yeah. It's all ad-hoc changes accreted over time. Don't let anyone fool you, Unix didn't get designed, it evolved organically.

Replies (4)

@chpietsch@fedifreu.de 2026-07-13 22:21

@mos_8502@studio8502.ca While you are at it, please remind people that usr does not stand for “user” although it is pronounced “user” and used to stand for “user”.

Open ##3794616
@harald4toot@troet.cafe 2026-07-13 23:21

@mos_8502@studio8502.ca actually /usr originally was for 'unix system ressources.' the user's stuff was mounted on /home dunno where the usr == user legend came to be believed... via @chpietsch@fedifreu.de

Open ##3800388
@Yuki@im-in.space 2026-07-13 22:11

@mos_8502@studio8502.ca that's pretty much the same mood as /usr existing entirely because hard drives on PDPs back then were 3 MB and UNIX needed to be split between hard drives, of course they've done this kind of arbitrarily, and then that was only later they've put some rules to justify what they were doing

Open ##3840966
@havoc@mastodon.sdf.org 2026-07-13 22:40

@mos_8502@studio8502.ca IIRC Plan 9 has a more consistent approach to mounting drives and locations. I've really been meaning to do the Plan 9 boot camp one of these days... just throw it on the project pile...

Open ##3840967