Directory Structure

Introduction

The Ghost/FreeBSD directory hierarchy is fundamental to obtaining an overall understanding of the system. The most important directory is root or, “/”. This directory is the first one mounted at boot time and it contains the base system necessary to prepare the operating system for multi-user operation. The root directory also contains mount points for other file systems that are mounted during the transition to multi-user operation.

A mount point is a directory where additional file systems can be grafted onto a parent file system (usually the root file system). This is further described in FreeBSD Handbook Section 3.6, “Disk Organization”.

Standard mount points include

: /usr/
: /var/ 
: /tmp/
: /mnt/  
: /cdrom/ 

These directories are usually referenced to entries in

/etc/fstab

This file is a table of various file systems and mount points and is read by the system. Most of the file systems in

/etc/fstab

are mounted automatically at boot time from the script

rc(8)

unless their entry includes noauto. Details can be found in FreeBSD Handbook Section 3.7.1 “The fstab File”.