Understanding the bin, sbin, usr/bin , usr/sbin split

Lennart Sorensen lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org
Tue Feb 7 15:19:31 UTC 2012


On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 07:08:37PM -0500, Christopher Browne wrote:
> The fact that initrd wasn't there in the beginning doesn't prevent it
> from indicating something that's effectively true today.  Yes, initrd
> is there to satisfy much the same things that /sbin used to be for.

It is only effectively true for some types of systems.  It is not true
for all systems and probably never will be.

> To a considerable extent, the split of /bin vs /usr/bin vs /sbin vs
> /usr/bin vs whatever else often doesn't matter anymore.

But when it does matter it really sucks if someone has decided to make
it hard to keep.

> After all, if all you use $PATH for is to type in one of
> (firefox|libreoffice|xterm), or hide such behind a menu system, the
> notion of even having $PATH is somewhat obsolete.

That's a pretty good use of PATH.  Also allows me having $HOME/bin in
the path which is unique to my user, and add other places if I have a
reason to (like those awful commercial aplications that think
/opt/applicationname/bin is a good idea).

> (Of course, that may be contrasted with needing to add /usr/bin/mh to
> your PATH ;-)!)
> 
> I wonder if we could use something cleverer, to include programs of
> interest and exclude uninteresting ones; Hurd was going to try to go
> somewhere like that, by having something a bit like a union mount so
> that it anticipated you ought only need a /bin directory that would
> combine all the programs that your user would have access to.

Interesting to who?  If it wasn't interesting, why is it installed?

Sounds like a solution looking for a problem to solve.

-- 
Len Sorensen
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