4.3.2.2. The merged file hierarchy

Microsoft Windows uses drive designators at the start of pathnames, such as the C: in C:\Windows\System32\foo.dll , to indicate which disk drive a particular file is on. Linux instead merges all active filesystems into a single file hierarchy; different drives and partitions are grafted onto the tree in a process called mounting.

You can view the mount table, showing which devices are mounted at which points in the tree, by using the mount command:

$ mount

/dev/mapper/main-root on / type ext3 (rw)

/dev/proc on /proc type proc (rw)

/dev/sys on /sys type sysfs (rw)

/dev/devpts on /dev/pts type devpts (rw,gid=5,mode=620)

/dev/md0 on /boot type ext3 (rw)

/dev/shm on /dev/shm type tmpfs (rw)

/dev/mapper/main-home on /home type ext3 (rw)

/dev/mapper/main-var on /var type ext3 (rw)

/dev/sdc1 on /media/usbdisk type vfat

(rw,nosuid,nodev,_netdev,fscontext=system_u:object_r:removable_t,user=chris)

Or you can view the same information in a slightly more readable form, along with free-space statistics, by running the df command; here I've used the -h option so that free space is displayed in human-friendly units (gigabytes, megabytes) rather than disk blocks:

$ df -h

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/mapper/main-root

30G 12G 17G 42% /

/dev/md0 251M 29M 210M 13% /boot

/dev/shm 506M 0 506M 0% /dev/shm

/dev/mapper/main-home

48G 6.6G 39G 15% /home

/dev/mapper/main-var 30G 13G 16G 45% /var

/dev/sdc1 63M 21M 42M 34% /media/usbdisk

Note that /media/usbdisk is a flash drive, and that /home and /var are stored on separate disk partitions from / .