We (our company) has just purchased a new IBM unix machine. We have been doing some research and have found that it is NOT a good idea to put your own in-house-written applications under the existing file folders such as /usr or /bin ect. Instead you should place these applications in directories created below the /HOME directory. Is this correct??

Are there suggestions as to where to put your in house developed applications??

Thanks in advance for any replies.

we do the latter were i work. i have put a few scripts in the usr/bin just because i didn't want to play around with the PATH to much. why we do it, i don't know i just know it's good practise to do it (maybe even best practise).

Most large applications place all their code and libraries under a wholly separate directory tree, for example Oracle, Passport, etc. If you want failover, each directory should be on it's own filesystem and physical disk, served from a SAN or other file server. Whichever system is currently in the role of production box can then mount them.

So it does sound like putting directories under /usr is not wise and we would be better off creating a production directory structure under the /HOME directory.

Thanks for the replies and please feel free to add to this if my above assumption is not correct OR there are differing opinions.

Thanks again.

I wouldn't recommend /home, this is really for users' home directories for their private data. I'm with Jim's advice on this one - keep major applications in their own file systems so that they can be backed up easily and can't be affected by a UNIX installation/upgrade.
For a good (and very detailed) overview of (one group's ideas) of how directories should structured, see http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html

I'm a little confused. When you say "keep major applications in their own file systems" do you mean create their own directories at the root level????

After briefly reading the detailed document you provided (thanks) it said that you should not create additional subdirectories at the root level.

You are going to get a lot of different opinions as to what's "best".
My suggestion to you would be to determine what your needs are within your environment (as in what's in your new box, how extensive/mission critical your in-house apps are) before making a decision.
How extensive are these in-house applications? Something small that requires little hard drive space, it's easy to re-install, and has no data that needs to be backed up can go in /usr/local/bin. If you are talking about something like Oracle, or Netcool, or Suitespot, i.e., applications that require lots of hard drive space, need to be backed up, etc, you'd want to put those in their own slice (or disk, depending on what you have). Whether is off / or /usr/ or whenever, it doesn't matter as long as they are in their own slice/disk; technically, they wouldn't be off any of those directories. Ex: /opt can sit in /dev/dsk/c0t0d0s6, and have /opt/netcool sit on /dev/dsk/c2t3d1s4. If you issue an ls command, it'd seem that netcool is off /opt, but if you issue a df command, you'll find out it isn't.