Linux From Scratch: Version 5.0-pre2
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# Creating directories

Let's now create some structure in our LFS file system. Let's create a directory tree. Issuing the following commands will create a more or less standard tree:

    mkdir -p /{bin,boot,dev/{pts,shm},etc/opt,home,lib,mnt,proc}
    mkdir -p /{root,sbin,tmp,usr/local,var,opt}
    for dirname in /usr /usr/local
        do
        mkdir $dirname/{bin,etc,include,lib,sbin,share,src}
        ln -s share/{man,doc,info} $dirname
        mkdir $dirname/share/{dict,doc,info,locale,man}
        mkdir $dirname/share/{nls,misc,terminfo,zoneinfo}
        mkdir $dirname/share/man/man{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}
    done
    mkdir /var/{lock,log,mail,run,spool}
    mkdir -p /var/{tmp,opt,cache,lib/misc,local}
    mkdir /opt/{bin,doc,include,info}
    mkdir -p /opt/{lib,man/man{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8}}

Directories are, by default, created with permission mode 755, but this isn't desirable for all directories. We will make two changes: one to the home directory of root, and another to the directories for temporary files.

    chmod 0750 /root
    chmod 1777 /tmp /var/tmp

The first mode change ensures that not just anybody can enter the `/root` directory -- the same as a normal user would do with his or her home directory. The second mode change makes sure that any user can write to the `/tmp` and `/var/tmp` directories, but cannot remove other users' files from them. The latter is prohibited by the so-called "sticky bit" -- the highest bit in the 1777 bit mask.

## FHS compliance note

We have based our directory tree on the FHS standard (available at http://www.pathname.com/fhs/). Besides the above created tree this standard stipulates the existence of `/usr/local/games` and `/usr/share/games`, but we don't much like these for a base system. However, feel free to make your system FHS-compliant. As to the structure of the `/usr/local/share` subdirectory, the FHS isn't precise, so we created here the directories that we think are needed.

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