Can someone describe the purpose of OSX root level folders in laymen's terms?
It's a bit messy, and there is a degree of cross-overs, but the quick tour, without really going into the subfolders of these:
/etc
, /tmp
and /var
are just symbolic links to subfolders in /private
.
/etc
generally contains configuration files.
/tmp
is for temporary files used by running processes (also see /var/tmp
)
/var
is also used for somewhat temporary files used by running processes, but these tend to be less temporary and more often preserved between runs - e.g. logfiles which are usually in /var/log
.
/usr
contains binaries (executables) and developer-related files for core unix/BSD utilities. Things the user installs themselves should end up in /usr/local
.
/bin
also contains binaries but they tend to be more OS-fundamental than those in /usr
- such as cp
, cat
, bash
.
/sbin
is as above but focused on routine administrative tasks such as mount
and shutdown
. The s
=system/superuser, usually you need root/superuser rights to use these commands.
/.fseventsd
is used by the OS to log file-system change events (such as folder creation) so that interested parties can be notified when the filesystem changes.
However, to run the risk of saying what you didn't want me to say - most of these are of little interest, and if you were to use any, you'd be most likely to be in /usr/local
, /var/log
or /tmp
.
Additional information with a focus on the common Unix structure can be found on Wikipedia (Unix File System).
See man hier
:
-
/private
: this is undocumented -
/var
: multi-purpose log, temporary, transient, and spool files -
/usr
: contains the majority of user utilities and applications -
/tmp
: temporary files -
/etc
: system configuration files and scripts -
/bin
: user utilities fundamental to both single-user and multi-user environments -
/sbin
: system programs and administration utilities fundamental to both single-user and multi-user environments -
/fseventsd
: I believe you mean/.fseventsd
. It is documented here. gzipped data relating to file deletion and file system events is stored in a series of files in/.fseventsd
.