Standard for singular vs plural type names in urls [closed]

I've always heard that it doesn't matter as long as you're internally consistent.

That being said, in *nix system architecture it's always singular. (e.g "user", "home", "mnt", etc (or should that be "etc"?)), so that might be a better default since it's already common?

I personally prefer the plural, it indicates that there is a collection of Users, in which you are looking for fred.

To make @Satanicpuppy answer more precise, it's not always true that in *nix system architecture it's always singular. I think in *nix systems, since system admins are mostly accessing it using terminal, the priority is to type less, and that's why we

    have proc and not process,
    have mnt and not mount,
    have var and not variable,
    have usr and not user,
    ...

and the list goes on, another reason they used abbreviation(discussion here is not about singular or plural form, it's about why it's abbreviated). Regardless of OS it there were limitations on file system in old days. Limitations were on both Maximum Pathname Length and Maximum Filename Length . Maybe you can remember( if you are old enough;) ) a verylongnames.txt file turned into verylo~1.txt on windows, and if not here is the explenation).

But in recent years everything has changed: limitations has gone, nowadays UX and readability is an important issue, and most users use GUI to interact with computers. And that's a good reason that on all major operating systems(Linux, OS X and Windows) the users directory naming convention is the same:

    Users 
       '-Documents
       '-Downloads
       '-Movies/Videos
       '-Pictures

the only exception is that Users directory on linux is called home.

Other than the above reasons it is more common to use plural forms on the web:

In Django it's common to use plural form: like the polls app tutorial on the django documentation:

    # To get a list of polls
    /polls/ 

    # To get an individual poll item
    /polls/5/

Another good example is google, which uses:

    google.com/analytics
    google.com/analytics/settings
    google.com/analytics/feeds
    google.com/books
    google.com/catalogs
    google.com/maps
    google.com/places
    google.com/trends

also Bing uses plural form:

    bing.com/images
    bing.com/maps
    bing.com/results
    bing.com/videos

And of course stackoverflow:

   stackoverflow.com/users/
   stackoverflow.com/feeds/
   stackoverflow.com/questions/
   stackoverflow.com/tags/
   stackoverflow.com/help/badges

I prefer the singular /user/fred because it's more grammatically correct to the layman: you're looking at a user profile, for the user fred. However if /users/ shows all users, then /users/fred makes more sense.

Ultimately @Satanicpuppy is correct, what matters is that you're consistent.