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Part 1: How the Mac OS X File System is Organized

This section gives an overview of the organization of the Mac OS X file system. Discussion of the Yellow Box for Windowstm directory layout is deferred to Directory Layouts since the directory layouts for the Mac OS X file system and for Yellow Box on Windowstm differ in significant ways.

Mac OS X File System Layout

If you look closely at the Mac OS X file system, you can find all the directories of the traditional UNIX BSD 4.4 release. Users don't normally see these directories, however, unless they specifically set a "UNIX Expert" preference allowing it. Instead, Mac OS X's File Viewer displays only a small number of directories that organize the tools and information users need most. These directories are arranged so that resources local to the user's computer are segregated from those on the network, and system resources (that is, resources distributed with the Mac OS X release) are segregated from those under the control of the user or system administrator.

This arrangement of directories forms the basis of several conventions used by Mac OS X applications. For example, Mac OS X's File Viewer and other applications (using provided API) search this directory structure in a specific order to determine:

There are four nodes in the Mac OS X directory structure of particular interest:

The location of the user's home directory depends on the type of account (local or networked), but the other standard directories are found in the root (/) directory. (The hyperlinked directory names below take you to explanations of the purpose and contents of those directories.)

Notice the similar layouts within these four directories. Each has an Applications and Library subdirectory, for example, and the Local, Network, and System directories have even more in common. This parallelism provides the basis for Mac OS X's standard search routines, as described in the next section.

This directory layout is related to the one used in Mac OS X's predecessor, OpenStep. For information on the mapping between these systems, see Appendix B, Comparing The Mac OS X and OpenStep File Systems.

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