Arch Linux

blippy

Member

Registered: 2010-11-18

Posts: 38

All roads lead to /usr/bin?

I had been doing some installation work, and I was suprised to learn that /usr/sbin, /bin and /sbin are all symbolic links to /usr/bin. Can someone confirm that this is correct?

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: All roads lead to /usr/bin?

This is because the likes of "sbin" are obsolete relics.

ayekat

Member

Registered: 2011-01-17

Posts: 1,589

Re: All roads lead to /usr/bin?

From what I've gathered, the bin/sbin separation is to keep "system command" (i.e. commands you will likely not run in your everyday shell) from popping up in the tab-completing and from users running them carelessly. That merge is not treated in the article linked by brebs, as it is not directly related to the / vs /usr separation (but equally arbitrary).

From what I've seen, Fedora and Debian keep bin/sbin separate (and latter also makes the / vs /usr merge optional, but I guess this is just Debian being Debian). Gentoo seems to have followed the same way as Arch (full merge of everything into /usr/bin).

--edit--
Actually, following this mailing list thread, Gentoo's situation is not quite clear to me

Last edited by ayekat (2016-11-29 10:45:13)

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pkgs │ hacks │ cfg │ blag

Slithery

Administrator

From: Norfolk, UK

Registered: 2013-12-01

Posts: 5,776

Re: All roads lead to /usr/bin?

For reference...

https://www.archlinux.org/news/binaries … ervention/
https://lists.archlinux.org/pipermail/a … 22625.html

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No, it didn't "fix" anything. It just shifted the brokeness one space to the right. - jasonwryan
Closing -- for deletion; Banning -- for muppetry. - jasonwryan

aur - dotfiles

TheChickenMan

Member

From: United States

Registered: 2015-07-25

Posts: 354

Re: All roads lead to /usr/bin?

From what I've gathered, the bin/sbin separation is to keep "system command" (i.e. commands you will likely not run in your everyday shell) from popping up in the tab-completing and from users running them carelessly. That merge is not treated in the article linked by brebs, as it is not directly related to the / vs /usr separation (but equally arbitrary).

From what I've seen, Fedora and Debian keep bin/sbin separate (and latter also makes the / vs /usr merge optional, but I guess this is just Debian being Debian). Gentoo seems to have followed the same way as Arch (full merge of everything into /usr/bin).

--edit--
Actually, following this mailing list thread, Gentoo's situation is not quite clear to me

I thought Fedora had it setup similarly to Arch now though I would need to check. I'm pretty sure Suse has them separated as well.

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If quantum mechanics hasn't profoundly shocked you, you haven't understood it yet.
Niels Bohr

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: All roads lead to /usr/bin?

popping up in the tab-completing and from users running them carelessly

That can be fixed by e.g.:

chmod 700 /usr/bin/only-root-should-run-this

With sbin dirs, it was debatable whether some of the executables should be in sbin or bin - very messy.

The clincher for me was when Java's (either openjdk or icedtea, IIRC) installer hard-coded one of those sbin paths for where it expected to find an executable, rather than just looking in $PATH - such madness