This short article aims to provide a simple and useful explanation to the Linux directory structure.

• / - This is the top level root directory, that contains all other directories on the system.

• bin - This directory contains all the essential binary executable programs, required for booting, shells like cp, ls, grep, kill, vi text editor etc.

• boot - All of the static files used in booting the system are located here e.g grub, vmlinux

• cdrom - It is not part of the Filesystem hierarchy standard but can be found usually in Ubuntu. It is used as a temporary location for CD-ROMs.

• dev - Files related to the hardware as cdrom, cpu, drive can be found here. Also some pseudo-devices as dev/null.

• etc - Host-specific system configuration files.

• home - This is the home directory for each user on the system e.g /home/user1, /home/user2 that contains configurations per user.

• lib - All of the shared library images and kernel modules needed by /bin and /sbin.

• lost+found - All of the unlinked, corrupted files used to recover by fsck are placed here.

• media - All of the removable media as CD, USB when plugged into the system are mounted inside the media directory.

• mnt - This is used for a temporary mounting file system.

• opt - This directory contains optional packages and third party applications.

• proc - It contains the information related to the running processes.

• root - The home directory for the root user.

• sbin - Similar directory as /bin that contains essential binaries for system administration.

• srv - This directory contains most of the service related or files specific to servers.

• sys - The virtual file system.

• usr - All of the files used by the users, not by the system are saved in this directory.

• var - It contains most of the variable data files as logs, mails, temp files.