A small machine, and this is the shape of it. Only the parts worth walking into are here — enough that what you know about a Linux filesystem holds.

/

the root. Everything is somewhere under it.

/bin

one sh, as on NixOS, where it is the only thing in /bin.

/etc

the machine’s own configuration. /etc/passwd says who exists and where their home is, and is the answer to most questions about this shell. /etc/shadow is root’s, and refuses to be read, as it should.

/home

home directories. There is one, and you are standing in it.

/home/tilen

what ~ means here, and what the site is: every note Hugo rendered from the vault. It belongs to tilen, so you may read all of it and write none of it — until su says otherwise.

Not all of it, in fact: some of what ls -a turns up is -rw------- — the shell history, the key in .ssh. .plan is the exception, world-readable because that is what a .plan is for. See man su.

/nix/store

where what nginx serves actually lives. The hash in the name is a stand-in — the real one changes with every build, and this page is one of the things being built.

/root

root’s home, which you may see the name of and nothing else.

/srv

nothing, which is what NixOS keeps here.

/tmp

yours. It belongs to nobody (drwxrwxrwt, sticky, as /tmp has always been), and it is the one place in this filesystem you may write. What lands there lives in your browser and nowhere else — see man sh.

/usr/share/man

the manual, as files. ls /usr/share/man/man1 is this manual, and each .1 opens the page it is the source of.

/var/log

the log, which needs a user you are not.

Where it stops

Nothing here is a real machine, and the places a real one would have that this one does not — /dev, /proc, /sys — are simply absent rather than faked: a directory you can enter and find empty would be a worse lie than one that says it is not there.