Lion share of my writing here gets done on the weekends. Some are better than others in terms of productivity. If I can knock out 4 articles during those 2 days it really takes a load off my mind. I can then take it easy during the week, and not worry about cranking out more content to fill my silly self imposed quota. This weekend was Easter and it totally killed my productivity.
Rather than skipping a day, I decided to post a last minute silly Friday poll:
Wwhat is your favorite unix directory and why?
Me? Obviously I like /home cause that’s where I keep all my “stuff”, but that’s an obvious choice. To tell you the truth I was always drawn to and strangely fascinated by the pseudo devices such as /dev/random and /dev/null. The former is basically an entropy device producing endless, pseudo-random output. The later is a black hole which swallows all the input and never becomes full no matter how much you write to it. They are interesting on a philosophical level because of the two primal concepts they represent – chaos and oblivion.
The other pseudo devices like /dev/full and /dev/zero are not as interesting so I didn’t even include them on the list. Feel free to add them though. As usual, be nice and don’t abuse the write in option. Not that you guys usually abuse it. Surprisingly enough, this blog is one of the few places on the interwebs where the Norris Rule only applies to like half of the polls. I’m just saying that I will go in and delete inappropriate entries if needed.
Anyways, pick the directory in the poll and tell me why you like it in the comments. Being windows user is not an excuse for not participating. You can use windows if you like it – I don’t care. But you should be at least a little bit familiar with unix and linux – os agnosticism is good for you.
I like /dev/random because all my stuff is already in there … somewhere
@Martin Grandrath: LOL!
My favorite is quite boring… because –
“There’s no place like ~”
I like /etc because it’s fun to edit configuration files and read system start-up scripts.
Out of principle, I couldn’t pick /dev/random or /dev/null as these aren’t directories. I did choose /dev because that’s where all the cool stuff is, like the mentioned devices, loopback devices, sound card, webcam, hard drives, etc.
On Linux, as well as other unix-like operating systems, /dev/random is a true random number generator that gets entropy from the system’s device drivers. It’s slow, but a good source for strong key generation or PRNG seeds. /dev/urandom is the fast, non-blocking pseudo-random number generator.
I personally love the /mnt directory. I’m a person who likes to stay organized in a computing environment (not so much on my desk, however), so it’s a great place to control where my ‘extra’ devices are located. I can set up a few directories within /mnt for each device I use often – including my secondary ‘storage’ drive, and then a few directories for spontaneous mounts such as iso files or network shares.
Honestly, there’s no excuse to have sloppy mounting habits when /mnt exists to take care of that problem.
/etc
Why, because it’s where I seem to spend most of my time. :P
/usr/local or ~/.wine
Where all my games go :P
Defiantly /usr/local on this laptop, I’m not even sure wine would work on it, and even if it did I can think of very few Windows programs that would run on this thing even if it still had 98 installed on it.
/var – all the log files are here somewhere, along with data for pretty much every service (MySQL, mail servers, DNS, rrdtool-based apps, etc)
Since “ln -s” is my friend, I’ve got softlinks to /home/public/MYOOZIK, /home/public/Podcasts, /home/public/audio-books, and /home/public/e-books are softlinked to /home/${username}.
My favorite directory ist /tmp because that’s where I do all my experiments with small (and mostly useless) scripts.
The nice thing is this directory is always tidy after reboot :)