Adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to everyone's path in F10

Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com
Fri Apr 25 12:55:43 UTC 2008


Suren Karapetyan wrote:
>>>
>>> That solution has already been subscribed in the thread over and 
>>> over, symlink the tools that make sense from */sbin/ to */bin/ and be 
>>> done with it. It will solve all issues in both camps and we can carry 
>>> on.
>>
>> If you don't take them all, how does this solve the problem that 'su' 
>> vs. 'su -' will still not have all the same things included in your 
>> path?   Personally, I'd rather see everything moved to /bin and 
>> /usr/bin with /sbin and /user/sbin changed to compatibility symlinks, 
>> but that can only be done cleanly during a new install (or maybe 
>> wrapped in a reboot).
>>
> I don't quite understand why "su" and "su -" should be doing the same 
> thing.
> What's the point in "-" if they should do the same?

They shouldn't be doing the same thing, but (a) that's an obscure point 
that a new user should not have to learn while he's trying to fix some 
other problem if you don't want them to hate linux, and (b) when you do 
know the difference you may not really want it to happen.

> BTW tweaking PATH or symlinking stuff from */sbin into */bin or merger 
> won't make "su" behave like "su -".

That's not what I want.  I want to be able to run the programs that 
someone arbitrarily decided should live in /sbin or /usr/sbin without 
having to know that they are in /sbin or /usr/sbin (or who decided that, 
or when or why), _and_ without changing my working directory.

> Personally I'm happy doing "su" then "make install" if I don't want to 
> change cwd and my exports (CFLAGS?) and aliases and doing "su -" to do 
> some tweaking with iptables, ip, tc, dhcpd, asterisk...
> I've never liked the Ubuntu way of doing things. The first thing I did 
> on any Ubuntu system I had to use was "sudo passwd; su -"

On Ubuntu (and Mac, etc.) just 'sudo su -' to get a reasonable root 
shell.  If you drink the sudo kool-aid, that at least makes sense but it 
will still change your cwd.

> And also: I've never had */sbin in the PATH of my non-root user.

Isn't the first thing they ask you always 'why can't I run ifconfig (or 
fdisk, etc.)'?  Why confuse them with things the PATH mechanism was 
designed to take care of transparently for you?

-- 
   Les Mikesell
    lesmikesell at gmail.com




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