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A quick one... I noticed this folder in / on Kubuntu 15.10:
drwxrwxr-x 2 root root 4.0K Dec 12 02:33 cdrom
Why is it there and how is it used? Shouldn't CD-ROMs be (auto-)mounted in /media by udisks2 (or manually wherever I want them)? My current system doesn't have an optical drive, so I can't test this for myself. I just came across it while identifying folders in / to exclude in my rsync script.
I think it's there since ancient times and probably for various compatibility reasons.
Some explanation from CD-ROMs subchapter of The Linux Cookbook follows here:
Like the
/floppydirectory, the use of the/cdromdirectory is a standard practice and convenient, but not necessary -- you can mount disks in whatever empty directory you like. (You could even, for example, mount discs from the CD-ROM drive to/floppyand mount floppy disks to/cdrom, but why would anyone do that!)
Also, I found this post on Ask Ubuntu that has the ultimate answer to your question:
While
/mnt/and/media/are common places to mount devices, the device location can be just about anywhere./cdrom/was probably chosen for either brevity or legacy support.
/cdrom is used in modern distros, kudos for digging up that link. Searching for "/cdrom" on Google or the StackExchange sites is an excercise in futility...
Jan 1, 2016 at 1:17
/cdrom has been kept as a legacy mount point, and can be ignored by most users of recent distributions. I guess, in time, it will just go where /floppy went :)
Jan 1, 2016 at 4:14
/cdrom is as used as /floppy. sudo rmdir /cdrom to allow single char autocomplete on softlink /code. (Tested after digging through attic to find a CD-ROM, found a USB floppy drive - curious to know if install on a machine with an IDE floppy would yield /floppy)