Hidden directories question

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Rowland McDonnell - 20 Jul 2009 12:54 GMT

I've got a couple of external HDDs. I think that each might have been
used for backing up my boot disc at some time in the past, 'cos I can
see on each one this list of invisible directories (cd -la from
Terminal):

drwxrwxrwt 4 rowland rowland 136 Jul 3 2007 Volumes
drwxr-xr-x 4 rowland rowland 136 Mar 31 2007 automount
drwxr-xr-x 40 rowland rowland 1360 Jun 23 2007 bin
drwxrwxr-t 2 rowland rowland 68 Mar 23 2005 cores
lrwxr-xr-x 1 rowland rowland 11 Jul 3 2007 etc ->
private/etc
lrwxr-xr-x 1 rowland rowland 9 Jul 3 2007 mach ->
/mach.sym
-r--r--r-- 1 rowland rowland 604072 Jul 3 2007 mach.sym
-rw-r--r-- 1 rowland rowland 4347816 May 24 2007 mach_kernel
drwxr-xr-x 6 rowland rowland 204 Jul 3 2007 private
drwxr-xr-x 63 rowland rowland 2142 Jun 23 2007 sbin
lrwxr-xr-x 1 rowland rowland 11 Jul 3 2007 tmp ->
private/tmp
drwxr-xr-x 11 rowland rowland 374 Apr 8 2007 usr
lrwxr-xr-x 1 rowland rowland 11 Jul 3 2007 var ->
private/var

Is there any reason to keep any of those directories on a non-boot
volume?

Rowland.

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Simon Slavin - 20 Jul 2009 22:47 GMT

In article
<1j35l4y.s2rqs6ahe9wjN%real-address-in-sig@flur.bltigibbet>real-address

> Is there any reason to keep any of those directories on a non-boot
> volume?

They're all part of the boot process. If you don't need to boot from
thatpartition then you can just erase the entire partition.

(I suppose it's just possible that someone put some other files into
one of those directories but that's not what you'd normally do.)

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Rowland McDonnell - 21 Jul 2009 16:57 GMT

> > Is there any reason to keep any of those directories on a non-boot
> > volume?
>
> They're all part of the boot process. If you don't need to boot from
> thatpartition then you can just erase the entire partition.

Not quite - there is other data on 'em.

> (I suppose it's just possible that someone put some other files into
> one of those directories but that's not what you'd normally do.)

Righto. Ta.

Rowland.

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Mac Forum / Country Specific / UK Mac Group / July 2009

Hidden directories question