regarding boot time binaries

[madhusudhan_4]

Hi all,
while going through the linux file hierarchy I came across a sentence called boot time binaries which are present in the bin/. what does this mean?

[Matti_Kurkela]

See:
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/

The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard is designed to allow the /usr directory tree to be separate from the root filesystem. For example, if you have a group of centrally-managed workstations, they can use a single copy of a NFS-mounted /usr directory tree, which may even be read-only from the workstation's viewpoint. This allows the sysadmin to install or update the programs in the workstations' /usr directory tree in one operation: just manipulate the files in the NFS server, and the update is immediately effective in all the workstations.

But when a workstation like this is booting, it must have enough functionality available in the root filesystem to identify its hardware, set up networking and mount the /usr filesystem over NFS. To make this possible, the binaries required for these operations are placed in /bin and /sbin, which should always be located on the root filesystem.

The difference between /bin and /sbin is: the things in /bin are "basic commands" which are useful to all users of the system. Any things that require root privileges or are otherwise useful only for the sysadmin are placed to /sbin. So the normal users will have /bin included in their PATH setting, but not /sbin. The root user should have both.

MK