Red Hat NETSCAPE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 6.0 - CUSTOMIZATION User Manual download pdf (Page 244)

232 You Are Here

A little later in this chapter, when we introduce you to pipes and I/O redirection,you’ll discover that

there are other ways to view the contents of a directory.

Summary: To see the contents of a directory, type ls at a shell prompt; typing ls -a

will display all the contents of a directory; typing ls -a --color will display all the

contents categorized by color.

16.4 A Larger Picture of the Filesystem

Every operating system has a method of storing its ﬁles and directories so that it can keep track of

additions, modiﬁcations and other changes.

In Linux, every ﬁle is stored on the system with a unique name, in directories which can also hold

other ﬁles and directories – or, subdirectories.

You might think of the system as a tree-like structure, in which directories “branch off.” Those direc-

tories may contain – or be the “parent” of – other directories which may hold ﬁles or directories of

their own.

There wouldn’t be a tree without a root, and the same is true for the Linux ﬁlesystem. No matter how

far away the branches, everything is connected to the root, which is represented as a single forward

slash (/).

It might seem confusing to have several references to “root” - the root account, the root account’s

administrator, is just as important to keeping things together in the system as the system’s root (/).

Tip: Even though there are other Linux distributions, your Red Hat Linux system is

likely to be compatible with them. The reason is because of the Filesystem Hierarchy

Standard (also known as FHS). These guidelines help to standardize the way system

programs and ﬁles are stored on all Linux systems. You can read more about the FHS at

its website:

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

As long as we’re logged into our user account – which will help prevent disastrous mistakes – let’s

take a look around.

The ﬁrst stop on this tour ought to be the root directory, which will give us a larger picture of where

things are.

At the shell prompt, then, let’stype:

1 2 ... 239 240 241 242 243 244 245 246 247 248 249 ... 299 300

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Red Hat NETSCAPE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM 6.0 - CUSTOMIZATION User Manual Page 244