On Sat, Jun 1, 2013 at 12:02 AM, Alister <alister.w...@ntlworld.com> wrote: > /etc is used to store configuration files for the operating system & if > you inadvertently corrupt the wrong one then you could kill the system.
Expanding on this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_Hierarchy_Standard The FHS applies to Linux, but you'll find it close to what other Unix-like OSes use too. It's extremely common to *read* config files from directories like /etc, but to require root privileges to edit them. If you need to store data files for some application that runs as your own user, one good place is a dot-file or directory in your home directory - for instance, I have: /home/rosuav/.wine/ /home/rosuav/.bash_history /home/rosuav/.ssh/ /home/rosuav/.SciTE.session and many more. All of these are happily read/written by processes running under the user 'rosuav' (my primary login user). If a different user fires up bash, a different .bash_history will be used. This system works well for users that represent humans. The other type of user is the one that, well, doesn't represent a human :) Figuring out where they can store files is a bit harder. PostgreSQL gets itself a directory somewhere - maybe /opt/postgresql, maybe /var/lib/postgresql - and restricts itself to that. But the directory is created by root and then handed over (chowned) to the other user. Both these options work well; random processes editing stuff in /etc doesn't :) ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
