>*N*X/POSIX legacy trash is as fundamental and natural to computing as binary electronics
http://lists.busybox.net/pipermail/busybox/2010-December/074114.html
> I see that busybox spreads it's links over these 4 directories.
>
> Is there a simple rule which decides which directory each link lives
> in.....
>
> For instance I see kill is in /bin and killall in /usr/bin.... I don't
> have a grip on what might be the logic for that.
You know how Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie created Unix on a PDP-7 in 1969?
Well around 1971 they upgraded to a PDP-11 with a pair of RK05 disk packs (1.5
megabytes each) for storage.
When the operating system grew too big to fit on the first RK05 disk pack (their
root filesystem) they let it leak into the second one, which is where all the
user home directories lived (which is why the mount was called /usr). They
replicated all the OS directories under there (/bin, /sbin, /lib, /tmp...) and
wrote files to those new directories because their original disk was out of
space. When they got a third disk, they mounted it on /home and relocated all
the user directories to there so the OS could consume all the space on both
disks and grow to THREE WHOLE MEGABYTES (ooooh!).
Of course they made rules about "when the system first boots, it has to come up
enough to be able to mount the second disk on /usr, so don't put things like
the mount command /usr/bin or we'll have a chicken and egg problem bringing
the system up." Fairly straightforward. Also fairly specific to v6 unix of 35
years ago.
The /bin vs /usr/bin split (and all the others) is an artifact of this, a
1970's implementation detail that got carried forward for decades by
bureaucrats who never question _why_ they're doing things.
HUMAN NATURE
U
M
A
N
N
A
T
U
R
E