Files in /

[Norman Gray]

Paul, hello.

On 4 Dec 2018, at 6:37, Paul Schmehl wrote:

> When I use ls -lsah /root, I get a completely different list of files.
>
> But neither of these utilities show 627M used in root. Why can't I see 
> what's using all this space in root? Am I using the wrong utilities to 
> view the files? Is it something else?

The confusion may arise from an incomplete understanding of the term 
'the root filesystem'.

That term refers to the filesystem starting at '/' (or, more precisely, 
the on-disk structure which is mounted at the root directory '/').  
That's distinct from '/root', which is merely a directory which is the 
home directory of the user called 'root', which lives under '/'.  
There's no real connection between these two uses of the word 'root', 
but now you come to mention it, I can see where confusion is possible.

As Michael says, there's other stuff in the root directory '/':

% ls -F /
COPYRIGHT	etc/		mnt/		root/		var/
bin/		home/		net/		sbin/		zroot/
boot/		lib/		pool/		sys@
dev/		libexec/	proc/		tmp/
entropy		media/		rescue/		usr/

There is more detail in 
<https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/dirstructure.html>, and the 'Disk 
Organization' chapter it links to.

Best wishes,

Norman


-- 
Norman Gray  :  https://nxg.me.uk
SUPA School of Physics and Astronomy, University of Glasgow, UK