Re: [Mingw-msys] New User

[MARSHALL K. <Kei...@to...>]

> I am trying to install Msys on my 98SE system.
> But for some reason the "usr"directory seems
> to show as a hidden file.
> The only way I know it is there is if I try to
> mkdir it says it already exists and if I try
> rmdir it says permission denied.

This is normal behaviour.

/usr is *not* a directory; it is a mount point. If you
execute the mount command, with no arguments, you will see
it in the mount table, as something like ...

   G:\MSYS\1.0 on /usr type user (binmode,noumount)

To help you further understand this, unlike in Bill's world,
in the real UNIX world, we do not refer to drives, such as
C:, D:, etc.;  instead, we mount all physical storage devices
on to a single homogeneous file system, with a single root.
Thus, if I have a hard drive with two partitions, which would
become C: and D: in Windows, in a UNIX (or GNU/Linux) system
I would mount the first partition (Windows C:) as / (the root
of the file system), and the second partition (Windows D:) as
(say) /usr; thus all directories and files on my second disk
partition would show up under the *virtual* /usr directory.

MSYS emulates this UNIX behaviour, by mapping *both* / and /usr
to the same physical location within the host Windows file system,
(at G:\MSYS\1.0 in the above example), but you will see neither
in a Windows directory listing of G:\MSYS\1.0.

Actually, the MSYS emulation is slightly peculiar, in that, on a
real UNIX system the mount point /usr *would* appear in a directory
listing of /, but its absence from the MSYS listing is unimportant;
you can simply use it as you normally would, and everything should
work as expected, (but please don't add your own executables in
/usr/bin, on MSYS versions prior to 1.0.11).

HTH.

Regards,
Keith.