/sbin:/usr/sbin in mortal's PATH

[jeff]

Chris Tyler wrote:
> The /sbin and /usr/sbin directories contain many utilities that are
> useful to non-superusers, such as ifconfig, netstat, arp, fuser, lsusb,
> runlevel, dumpe2fs, hwclock, lsof, traceroute, and many others.
> Obviously, most of those utilities can do -more- when run as superuser,
> but that doesn't diminish their value to mortals.

I once asked about this wrt `ifconfig` in #fedora and got lashed as if I 
asked for mp3 support or something...

I believe the correct answer is not to add sbin to users' paths, but to 
move binaries out of sbin  and into bin and symlink them so they don't 
break old scripts. By my reading, this is what the FHS implies, but 
there is lots of inertia to such a change.

/sbin: "Utilities used for system administration (and other root-only 
commands) are stored in /sbin, /usr/sbin, and /usr/local/sbin."
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#PURPOSE16

Note "root-only"


/usr/sbin:  "This directory contains any non-essential binaries used 
exclusively by the system administrator"
http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#PURPOSE25

Note "EXCLUSIVELY"


For this reason a few years ago `traceroute` was moved out of sbin.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=18313

I encounter this issue all the time ("how come `ifconfig` isn't 
installed on my system?")--I even heard it this morning...

In sum, it would be a nice change, but it's highly unlikely. As I was 
told, "it's been discussed over & over and the netgods have made their 
decision".

-Jeff