user $PATH problem

[Gene Heskett]

Greetings;

I've been trying to help Anne Wilson setup a working amanda system at 
her place for over a week now, and having all sorts of troubles that 
were triggered by the amanda executables not being in the user amanda's 
environmental path when she actually logs in as amanda, as opposed to 
doing an 'su amanda' from root, which of course gets you the full 
maryann of roots $PATH.  Thats why when she sent me an example of the 
command she was useing, it was always after cd'ing to the amanda src 
tree and doing "./amcheck" or whatever, otherwise she was getting not 
found messages.

This was found by "su - amanda" means here, and its a huge gotcha for 
the unwary.  Seemingly un-necessary paranoia to me, but...

When doing it as amanda, with amanda's full $PATH, /usr/local/sbin, 
where all of amanda's executables live, is NOT in the $PATH.

Adding it to ~/.bash_profile seems to allow it to survive the 
pathmunge'ing being done in /etc/profile, so I'm A) confused as to why 
it does, and B) in any event, is there a good reason to dis-allow 
access to /usr/local/sbin for the normal user?

Explain it to me please.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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