HEADS UP: /bin and /sbin are now dynamically linked

[Brent Jones]

On Nov 16, 2003, at 9:22 AM, Richard Coleman wrote:
> Robert M.Zigweid wrote:
>> I'll admit to being mostly a lurker here, but isn't the point of 
>> /sbin to be statically linked.  That's what the 's' stands for?
>> Second question.  This seems to imply that /sbin and /bin both have 
>> to have the same behavior?  I have no problem with /bin being 
>> dynamically linked, but what if I want /bin to be dynamic and /sbin 
>> static?
>> Regards,
>> Robert M. Zigweid
>
> I'm not sure what that would accomplish.  If a system was broken such 
> that the dynamically linked binaries in /bin didn't work, the 
> utilities in /sbin wouldn't be enough to fix the system.  For 
> instance, you wouldn't have a shell or "ls".

This is just a case of OS evolution.  /sbin used to be the place where 
the statically linked recovery things would be placed, in case the 
shared libraries got hosed.  The only things that needed to be 
statically linked though, were system utilities, which is why people 
probably started to associate the "s" with system, rather than static.

When this happened, you started to see the duplicates that used to 
exist in /bin (or /usr/bin) and /sbin disappear.  Since you still need 
a place to have statically linked recovery utilities, /rescue was 
created.  Now you see the duplicates in /bin (or /usr/bin) and /rescue 
instead.

Brent