What are the most important directories in Linux
Working with a Linux distribution is a completely different thing. If you are a windows user you can see they have a drive-based structure for the file systems. If I take an example there is a system directory called C:/windows/system32. If you have another partition they will be D:\, E:\, etc. All the files and folders are inside of those drives. So every file path is starting with a drive letter. But in Linux, we treat all things as directories. The directory tree begins with '/'. We call it the root of the tree.
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[email protected]:~$ ls /
0 dev initrd.img lib64 mnt root snap tmp vmlinuz
bin etc initrd.img.old lost+found opt run srv usr vmlinuz.old
boot home lib/root and /home directories
Actually, in Linux, there are three things called root. Above the root of the directory tree is a one. Next, we have a superuser called 'root'. Also, there is a special directory as /root that's owned by the root user. this one is equal to the home folder of the root. Normal users have their own home folders in /home. If your user name is 'us3r' your home folder will be /home/us3r. I think you may have seen that many times there is a flag called root.txt in CTF s inside /root. So if you want to get that flag you need to root the mashing.
/var directory
Hear you can find files that have a variable size. It's a common thing that the htdocs folder of the server is located in this directory. In early versions that was /var/www and now that's /var/www/html. Also, log files are located inside this directory. (/var/logs)
[email protected]:~$ ls /var
backups lib lock mail run spool unicornscan
cache local log opt snap tmp www/tmp directory
This is the place for temporary files. Usually, this folder has written permission for all. You may find that when uploading a shell to the server we first change the current directory to /tmp.
/sys /usr directory
This directory comes with commands and data files. There are many sub-application files in /usr/share folder.
[email protected]:~$ ls /usr
bin games include lib lib64 local sbin share src var
[email protected]:~$ ls /usr/share
accountsservice gvfs pev
aclocal hal php7.2-common
aclocal-1.16 hamster-sidejack php7.2-json
adduser hashcat php7.2-mysql
afl hashcat-utils php7.2-opcache
aglfn help php7.2-pgsql
airgeddon hexorbase php7.2-readline
alsa hfsprogs php7.2-sqlite3
android-framework-res highlight pipal
ant homebank pixmaps/etc directory
This folder is responsible for holding all configuration files. If you want to tweak your Is or programs you may need to go there. For example to change sources in apt you want to edit /etc/sources.d
[email protected]:~$ ls /etc
adduser.conf gimp menu-methods rmt
adjtime glvnd mercurial rpc
aliases gnome-system-tools mime.types rsyslog.conf
alsa gnuradio miredo rsyslog.d
alternatives groff miredo.conf samba
amap group mke2fs.conf sane.d
anonsurf group- modprobe.d scalpel
apache2 grub.d modules screenrc
apm gshadow modules-load.d securetty
apparmor gshadow- mono security
apparmor.d gss motd selinux
apt gtk-2.0 mpv sensors3.conf
arpwatch gtk-3.0 mtab sensors.d/bin directory
This directory contains all executable binary files required for booting the system. Commands those run in single user-mode such as ls, ping, chmod are also located here.
[email protected]:~$ ls /bin
bash findmnt netstat su
btrfs fsck.btrfs networkctl sync
btrfsck fuser nisdomainname systemctl
btrfs-find-root fusermount ntfs-3g systemd
btrfs-image getfacl ntfs-3g.probe systemd-ask-password
btrfs-map-logical grep ntfscat systemd-escape
btrfs-select-super gunzip ntfscluster systemd-hwdb/lib directory
Here you can find system libraries and kernel modules.
/opt directory
This folder can be used to hold custom program files. If you wanted to install sublime manually you may copy files to /opt/sublime.
[email protected]:~$ ls /opt
car-hacking firmware-mod-kit sublime_text Teeth xplico/dev directory
This directory Contains device-related files for all hardware devices. If you are going to mount a new drive you may need this directory.
[email protected]:~$ ls /dev
agpgart kmsg serial tty20 tty47 uhid
autofs log sg0 tty21 tty48 uinput
block loop-control sg1 tty22 tty49 urandom
bsg lp0 sg2 tty23 tty5 vcs
btrfs-control mapper sg3 tty24 tty50 vcs1
bus mem sg4 tty25 tty51 vcs2
cdc-wdm0 memory_bandwidth shm tty26 tty52 vcs3
cdrom mqueue snapshot tty27 tty53 vcs4
cdrw net snd tty28 tty54 vcs5So I hope you got an idea about the Linux directory tree. Thank you for reading. Just leave a comment if something is unclear or wrong.
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Thilan Dissanayaka
Hi, I'm Thilan from Srilanka. An undergraduate Engineering student of University of Ruhuna. I love to explorer things about CS, Hacking, Reverse engineering etc.
