# What are the purpose of these directories?



## stonee (May 8, 2010)

I have completed an initial minimal install of FreeBSD 7.2. Below the root directory there are some directories created which seem to have no purpose. What are these for?

   /compat
   /dist
   /media
   /sys

Can they be deleted?

The handbook does not include these as part of its directory structure documentation.


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## graudeejs (May 8, 2010)

hier(7)


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## stonee (May 8, 2010)

Thanks for the pointer.

It seems like /sys is for the kernel source, and /media for removable media (kind of makes me wonder about /cdrom*). 

Also, /compat appears to be provided for compatibility purposes, specifically to address the issue of duplicate files such as those installed for linux support.

What of /dist?


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## graudeejs (May 8, 2010)

yes, sys is a link to /usr/src/sys


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## Beastie (May 8, 2010)

stonee said:
			
		

> It seems like /sys is for the kernel source


Yes and /src is for the rest. /sys is a symlink as killasmurf86 said. You can find more about it by doing `% ls -l /sys`.



			
				stonee said:
			
		

> , and /media for removable media (kind of makes me wonder about /cdrom*).


There's also /mnt. You can use them as you want. /media is sometimes used by desktop environments for automounting, if I'm not mistaken. As for /cdrom, /cdrom1, etc. they're not even in the base system and are created by sysinstall(8) during the setup.
Anyway, when you mount removable media as a user, it's always better to have the mount points inside your home directory, e.g. ~/mnt/cd2/.



			
				stonee said:
			
		

> What of /dist?


It's clearly written: mount point used by sysinstall(8).


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## stonee (May 8, 2010)

Excellent! This is much more clear, and not so alien. 

Thanks for your replies, it is helpful in determining a permissions and partitioning strategy.

:e


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## grahamperrin@ (Jan 13, 2022)

graudeejs said:


> hier(7)



FreeBSD bug 261144 – hier(7): Document /sys and the function of this symlink


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## Deleted member 30996 (Jan 13, 2022)

Beastie said:


> There's also /mnt. You can use them as you want. /media is sometimes used by desktop environments for automounting, if I'm not mistaken. As for /cdrom, /cdrom1, etc. they're not even in the base system and are created by sysinstall(8) during the setup.
> Anyway, when you mount removable media as a user, it's always better to have the mount points inside your home directory, e.g. ~/mnt/cd2/.


I've always used /media to mount USB sticks and CD/DVD manually, don't use automount and have never used /mnt.

First I have to manually create /media/da0s1 and /media/cdrom from within x11-fm/xfe:


```
mount -v -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /media/da0s1
umount -v -t msdosfs /dev/da0s1 /media/da0s1

mount -v -t msdosfs -F32 -o large /dev/da0s1 /media/da0s1
umount -v -t msdosfs -F32 /dev/da0s1 /media/da0s1

mount_cd9660 /dev/cd0 /media/cdrom
umount_cd9660 /dev/cd0 /media/cdrom
```


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