Mac OS X Beta File Structure Layout

The file structure of Mac OS X Beta is very complicated to a long-time user of Macintoshes, but it's at least a somewhat streamlined file structure compared with other implimentations of Unix. As you may know already, it's largely based on BSD 4.4 (at least as of this publication). This may be of use to developers and the curious. As many OS X Server users will note, things have changed! This list is not meant to be exhaustive, but to point the way to some things that you may be looking for and want to find in a hurry. Many files and lesser directories are left out. Note: directories in bold, links in italics, commentaries in grey.

.Trashes .vol AppleShare PDS Library ApplicationSupport ColorSync Profiles full of monitor settings Documentation Administration Commands contains directories for ...bc, diffutils, gawk, grep, ...gzip, tar, wget Services apache apache_mod_ssl ntp sendmail Help Apple Help Viewer MacHelp.help QuickTime.help Fonts Internet Plug-Ins Xtras Preferences DirectoryService Receipts When you install, receipts of what went ...where ends up in here and can be used to ...cleanly and easily de-install WebServer Where all your Apache files sit CGI-Executables all CGI / Perl scripts go here Configuration configuration files Documents where the web pages sit by default Logs logging info kept here ProxyCache

Network Networked files and programs sit in here Applications Connected Servers Library Servers Users

System Library Apache Icons Modules Appearance Sound Sets Assistants Setup.assistant SharedBundles Authenticators Kerberos.loginAuthenticator CFMSupport BridgeLibraries StubLibraries Caches Classic ColorPickers ColorSync CMMs Profiles Scripting Colors Apple.cir System.cir Components Contains some odd and interesting stuff CoreServices Containing some core stuff ...of which I'll just name a few: CharacterSets Desktop.app DesktopDB Dock.app Encodings Resources SecurityAgent.app SecurityServer SecuritySettings.app WindowServer See Frameworks, below Displays Overrides Extensions Lots of ATI, USB, Firewire, IO drivers and such Filesystems AppleShare cd9660.fs cddafs.fs hfs.fs udf.fs ufs.fs Find Various word services to help out finds ContentIndexing.app PlugIns Fonts the fonts Frameworks WAY too many frameworks to go through. Internet Plug-Ins Java com apple cocoa admin application assistant eocontrol eointerface foundation niaccess niinterface preferences scripting misc BundleClassLoader.class StandardClassLoader.class net security utility Keyboards OpenSSL certs lib misc private Perl Again, way too big to go into Preferences Good old fashioned preferences Printers Drivers PPDs PrivateFrameworks More frameworks QuickTime QuickTimeJava Rulebooks Some language tools ScriptingAdditions ColorSyncScripting.app StandardAdditions.osax Contents MacOS Resources Security Services Sounds Speech Voices StartupItems Accounting Apache AppServices AppleShare AppleTalk AuthServer Cleanup ConfigServer Cron DirectoryServices Disks IPServices NFS Network NetworkTime Portmap QuickTimeServer SSH SecurityServer Sendmail SystemLog SystemTuning SystemConfiguration SystemResources Tcl Tcl v8.1 bin contains many basic commnds cores see private/cores dev etc see private/etc mach it's just mach.sym mach.sym the symmetric organizing part of the mach kernel? mach_kernel the mach kernel!

private Drivers cores etc your (almost) standard BSD /etc directory mail ppp tmp standard temp space (OmniWeb downloads here) 0 Clean At Startup Temporary Items var at jobs backups cron tabs where the crontabs are stored db dhcpclient locate.database netinfo volinfo.database log Very important place to know about. Most all the important system logging is in here. mail msgs root If you log in as root, this is your home. Documents Library MailAccounts Mailboxes run pids for system things rwho spool Faxes appkit lpd mqueue output tmp vm your swap space yp

sbin bunch of good BSD stuff, ...including mounters and some key system commands tmp see private/tmp usr bin More commands than you can shake a stick at include /System/Library/Frameworks .../System.framework/Headers/bsd lib libexec binutils emacs gawk gdb ppc local sbin share calendar dict the system dictionaries in here emacs enscript gawk gdb gnats groff info init tcsh locale man all your man files misc nvram sendmail conf tabset vi zoneinfo standalone ppc boot stuff template user var see private/var