useless and useful distinctions [LWN.net]

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 27, 2012 11:43 UTC (Fri) by kragilkragil2 (guest, #76172)
In reply to: useless and useful distinctions by eru
Parent article: The case for the /usr merge

Yeah, I also don't get why we still need sbin directories? Any ideas?

to post comments

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 27, 2012 12:03 UTC (Fri) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link] (4 responses)

For one, so that normal user's PATH isn't cluttered with commands that only root is supposed to run. Improves autocompletion, too.

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 27, 2012 12:42 UTC (Fri) by zyga (subscriber, #81533) [Link] (1 responses)

I kind of like being able to tab-complete $ sudo ...

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 27, 2012 17:58 UTC (Fri) by iabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link]

In order to tab-complete "sudo ...", your shell needs a rule that what follows "sudo" is found from $PATH, not cwd. If it has a rule, it can have the rule tab-complete based on /usr/bin and /usr/sbin instead of actually using $PATH (which is likely to include things like ~/bin which won't be in root's PATH, as well as not including /usr/sbin).

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 27, 2012 17:52 UTC (Fri) by sjj (guest, #2020) [Link]

FWIW, Fedora has had sbin directories in the default user path since F10.

My personal annoyance is that ifconfig is in /usr/sbin, and I often need to consult it as a regular user.

useless and useful distinctions

Posted Jan 28, 2012 16:42 UTC (Sat) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link]

A quick look at the contents of /sbin on my system turns up quite a few programs useful for non-root users, and very few only usable by root. In particular, disk and filesystem utilities work well on loopback files, networking tools provide useful output, and most other binaries have some useful function for non-root (even if just displaying useful output without allowing changes).