The strangeness called `sbin'

[Ed Schouten]

Hi Peter,

* Peter Wemm <peter at wemm.org>, 20111110 17:56:
> Of course, that pales in comparison to the impact of adding
> /usr/local/bin to the path, but it does show this does have potential
> user visibility.  And there's also the issue that most most users add
> every possible directory to their $PATH anyway.

Exactly. Also, there are shells nowadays that cache all binaries in PATH
up front, such as zsh. When they start, they loop through all dirents in
all directories in $PATH and add it to a big cache. This entirely
defeats this purpose.

I don't think that there are that many people who don't add /sbin and
/usr/sbin to $PATH nowadays. I have colleagues of mine who use Linux
systems that don't have this in their $PATH. When I ask them whether it
causes problems for them, they deny, but it turns out they simply put
`sudo' in front of it, to work around that, regardless of whether it was
needed.

> Is it really worth it though?  Perhaps fix the couple of oddball cases
> instead? (eg: md5, lastlogin and friends). ac used to require access
> to privileged files due to privacy concerns on shared user systems.

I think if we have to look at each tool and re-examine whether they
should be in bin or sbin and convert them to do so, it would take
approximately the same amount of investment as moving them into a single
place. And I am willing to do that. :-)

-- 
 Ed Schouten <ed at 80386.nl>
 WWW: http://80386.nl/
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 834 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/attachments/20111110/d9ff45dd/attachment.pgp