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
For me, the value in having a bin vs sbin split is in keeping system binaries (daemons, root-only tools) off the user's path. There's little value in a user starting inetd or apache2 from the command line, so why should those be present in the user's path? Same thing for system management tools that require root access for everything, such as dmsetup, blkdiscard, or shutdown (yes, Linux examples as I don't know FreeBSD).

Having only usable binaries in the path aids discoverability of the system.

>>tremon+Jj
There are many tools in sbin that should have been in bin instead. For example, there’s no need to run ifconfig as root if you only want to display the current set of addresses. Yet it lives in sbin.

This means that in practice people will just add sbin to PATH to get a somewhat usable system, which makes the division between bin and sbin useless.

Furthermore, on BSD derived systems binaries that should not be invoked by users directly (e.g., daemons) need to be stored in libexec.

>>EdScho+Ho
/sbin is for statically linked executables, while /bin is for dynamically linked executables. It has nothing to do with daemons vs non-daemons, nor with things having to run as root.

>>pmoria+vv
Then why is /sbin missing from PATH in Debian? Does that mean that only root can run statically linked binaries?

>>codedo+Ux
The tools that root needs are more often served by being statically linked than dynamically for the situations where the volume with the shared libraries fails to mount.

Having mnt be statically linked makes it much easier to recover that system.

The ideal of "/sbin for system tooling" isn't so much one of static vs dynamic but rather users accidentally finding system tools that don't work and sending email to the admin saying "mnt gives me a permission denied error" when they have no business running it.