zlacker

>>taubek+(OP)
I once sent out a proposal on the FreeBSD lists to merge /sbin with /bin, and /usr/sbin with /usr/bin. People were concerned that this would slow down the system, due to PATH lookups taking longer. Even when I demonstrated the opposite was true (it being faster due to fewer directories needing to be scanned), I wasn't able to get consensus. What a shame.

>>EdScho+Oa
Please correct me if I'm wrong. Aren't binaries in /sbin and /usr/sbin statically linked as opposed to no requirement like this for files living in /bin and /usr/bin?

I always thought the rationale was that if statically linked binaries are on different partition they can be used to recover the system from a failure.

Edit: files in /bin are also statically linked, and I am unsure about what I wrote above but vaguely recall something like that

>>pseudo+im
Yeah, this is received unix lore: anything needed to recover a system needs to be statically linked and in /bin or /sbin.

>>patrck+co
then: statically linked bins into /bin, all the others in /usr/bin and 2 symlinks /sbin -> /bin, /usr/sbin -> /usr/bin. It requires duplicate binaries: one version statically linked and the other not: I still want "env" to exist as statically linked, but tons of scripts start with this horrible '#/usr/bin/env MYPREFEREDSCRIPTENGINE'