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

[Erik Trulsson]

On Sun, Nov 16, 2003 at 07:24:00PM -0700, Brent Jones wrote:
> 
> 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.

Do you have any references for this?  Every single place that I can
find explains /sbin as "system binaries".  I have also never heard of
there ever being duplicates in /bin of the files in /sbin.



-- 
<Insert your favourite quote here.>
Erik Trulsson
ertr1013 at student.uu.se