I admit it, I’m a Linux nube. Just poking around with the sudo gainroot command and the directory structure confuses me.

My understanding is that when I’m not pretending to be the root, I only have access to a specific directory on the phone that looks like it is a root until I gain access as the root. At that point, I should be able to see this “User root” directory as a directory of the “real” directory.

So am I way off? I’m struggling to find the spot in the actual directory structure where the user directory structure begins. If anyone can point me there or where I’m wrong in my understanding, I would appreciate it.

before doing a gainroot, you are acting as the user "user" on your phone.
the home directory is /home/user

when you do gainroot, you become the root user on your phone
the root directory is /

/home/user/MyDocs is the directory structure that you will see when you connect your phone as a USB mass storage. this is the folder(partition) that contains the 27GB of space.

wiki has some useful info

As 'user' you can still see the stuff under / or under /etc/, and for the most part you can read these files but because of the permissions you shouldn't be able to write to them.

As 'root' you can edit anything.

The user directory structure is under /home/user for all of your personal files.
On other linux systems if you were to have other users, their home directories would be under /home/theusername/
The root user's home directory is usually under /root

http://www.google.com/search?q=linux...tory+structure

Is a good start

Thank guys. I’ve tried to research this. But can’t seem to get over the hurdle looking at Maemo/N900 specific information or generic Linux info.

When I look at the file manager (which is the dir structure I see for downloads) I see entries like
Audio Clips
Camera
Documents
Etc…

When I do a ls in xterminal without gaining root I see entries like
MyDocs
Main.conf

*** So where do these directories overlap? ***

Thanks to the posts here, I now realize that even without root, I can do a cd to the root directory. Previously I thought I could only access this area after gaining root.

Those directories are all within the MyDocs directory. Most of them are actually hidden (you'll need to do "ls -a" to see them) and the names you see for these in File Manager are the regionalised names (so .documents becomes Documents for English users, but will display differently for French, German, Spanish, etc users).

Thanks all. You've all sucessfully pulled Linux nube one step toward a better understading.

Hey Guys,
I had part of MyDocs wiped out by Homunculus.

Can you guys post a ls -al of your MyDocs dir? I need to do some rebuilding!

L

Thanx!

Would you care to elaborate on that?

I was a participant for sure.

I was in MyDocs

I highlighted a file and held it so that the pop up menu came up, I wanted to delete it. I knew that I was holding onto the file, so when the menu came up, and asked to delete, I selected yes.

Then I read the question: Delete MyDocs Yes/no

I had to POP the battery out to stop it. About 20 gigs gone!

I went back and looked at it again. Does it every time that way. MAJOR bug IMHO. But it was me that clicked yes.

Anyhow, can you do a LS -al and post it?

It would help a lot!