Alan M. Evans wrote:
On Fri, 2007-10-19 at 13:55 -0600, Karl Larsen wrote:
Robert P. J. Day wrote:
heh. indeed. when i'm teaching intro linux (and, yes, as frightening
as it sounds, i actually train people in the use of linux), i'm
typically *very* careful about my terminology:
/ *the* root directory
/root *root's* home directory
/home *the* home directory, as opposed to ...
/home/fred *fred's* home directory
distinguishing between these early saves all sorts of grief down the
road.
God help his students :-)
Why? Because he defines terms early and uses those terms consistently
from then on? Yeah, his students are in big trouble.
*the* root is more a concept of where something is at a particular time
as viewed by a particular process, not what it is. At some point in the
boot sequence the kernel will see an initrd (ramdisk) image as *the*
root, later it will be the partition grub said to mount as root, neither
of which may be what grub itself considered as its root during an
earlier stage of booting. Later some process may chroot() and see yet
another thing as root. Or you may reboot, selecting a different grub
entry that tells the kernel to mount a different partition at it's root
location.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
