On Tue, Oct 25, 2005 at 12:02:20PM +0200, meister@netz00.com wrote:
Am Dienstag 25 Oktober 2005 09:49 schrieb Francesco Scaglioni
: ... Seems as if ~/bin was being looked at prior to the shared bin.
on an old *nix system the order was /usr/(s)bin /usr/local/(s)bin. So you always end up with the commands the admin configured. On newer (Linux) systems the order changed: ~/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/bin to give programms that the user installed a chance. The old fashion is more secure and suitable for a multiuser (server) system, the newer fashion is really usefull for a single user (home user) system.
I disagree. No user has to have write access to /usr/local. If users can write into any directory in the default path: shoot the admin. Would you like to explain why you think it is more secure that /usr takes precedence over /usr/local[0]? This would make it very hard for the admin to 'replace' commands without altering the installed files. There is a lot of sense in having the order something like $HOME/bin;/urs/local/bin;/bin, and there is no other risk than that a user might shoot himself (and not others) in the foot. You might however argue about having $HOME/bin in there, I grant you that. And *sbin* does not belong into a users PATH by default, IMHO. Rasmus [0] I tend to think that it always was /usr/local over /usr, in the history of Unix, but am not historian enough to be able to prove it.