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Certain applications like Blender and Eclipse come precompiled in a tarball. Usually I put the directories in my home folder and access them from the command line. Is there a better place to put them and still adhere to POSIX standards (to a degree).

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I get the feeling that POSIX standard is mostly for programs that are integrated with the rest of your system and be used by other programs. I think standalone monolithic pre-compiled user apps are better kept separated (e.g. OSX application bundles). – Alex B Oct 19 '11 at 2:34
The only paths that POSIX dictates are /, /dev, /dev/null, /dev/tty and /dev/console. Did you mean the Linux FHS? That's a standard for OS vendors, not for administrators, so you don't have to follow it. Search the directory-structure tag here, similar questions have been asked before. – Gilles Oct 19 '11 at 9:55

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The place for this is in /opt for "Add-on application software packages" - these are packages that do not come with the distribution/OS.

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#OPTADDONAPPLICATIONSOFTWAREPACKAGES

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/opt it is then, thanks – MaxMackie Oct 19 '11 at 15:17
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Often applications like that are installed into /opt/, for example /opt/eclipse-3.2/. I prefer to put them into /usr/local/ (ex, /usr/local/eclipse-3.2/… But there is no particularly good reason for that.

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