Great link! The only reason I really know anything is due to on the job 
training at Sun and home usage.

To clarify what I meant about a per user application, well, what I meant 
was that a user could download your app and run it, without needing to 
write to any areas outside of their home directory. Any installation 
would just be creating a directory structure in their home directory and 
appending the application's location to their path environment variable. 
I can see this being a good approach for relatively lightweight 
applications and for single user (at a time) machines. A number of 
games, user made scripts, and small tools work like this, but overall it 
isn't terribly common. The biggest drawback, that I can think of, is in 
multi-user systems when you want everyone to be using the same version 
of a tool. It would also be hard to tie it into any of the repository 
based tools, I'd imagine, such as apt or yum.

The alternative is having the application install into one of the system 
areas, which are pretty much assumed to have execute access by any 
regular user and must be installed via root privileges. Just about 
anything you normally use is installed this way.

A daemon/agent setup is something of a sub-category of this. For 
instance, you have a mysql running on the machine via the daemon mysqld. 
You never interact with the daemon directly, but through an agent 
program, allowing the daemon to be compartmentalized in its own unique 
user space, where only it has dominion, providing the possibility of 
robust memory stability and better security. If an application needs to 
have high availability, meaning that it's very stable, then this is a 
good model to explore. For a lot of apps it would be overkill.

Obviously none of these concepts are solely linux terrain, but you 
usually end up facing them a bit more head on, at least as compared to 
Windows. You know, except that user/system separation is an achievement 
in linux, not an ill-defined goal. User/user separation too, for that 
matter. But I digress.

In general concepts it should be similar under OS X, but I don't have 
any solid experience there.

Best of luck,
Fargo

Tim Jones wrote:
> On Apr 19, 2007, at 2:03 PM, Jim Wagner wrote:
>
>   
>> Greetings -
>>
>> I need to find an appropriate location for application files under
>> Linux.
>>
>> These files will include ones generated by the application as it
>> functions and user-supplied script files. The application needs to
>> write these files only with standard user permissions. The user also
>> needs ready access to the files. There does not appear to be a blessed
>> Documents folder under Linux so what are some of the expected
>> locations?
>>     
>
> Hi Jim,
>
> Not to hit you with an TRTFM, but there is a document that covers  
> this stuff pretty well - the Linux FSSTND.  Check out:
>
> http://tldp.org/LDP/Linux-Filesystem-Hierarchy/html/index.html
>
> and click the link for the /home hierarchy.
>
> HTH,
>
> Tim
> --
> Tim Jones
> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
>   
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