On Sat, 2006-05-06 at 15:40 -0400, Chris Tyler wrote:
The /sbin and /usr/sbin directories contain many utilities that are
useful to non-superusers, such as ifconfig, netstat, arp, fuser, lsusb,
runlevel, dumpe2fs, hwclock, lsof, traceroute, and many others.
Obviously, most of those utilities can do -more- when run as superuser,
but that doesn't diminish their value to mortals.
For years, one of the first changes I've made to my Fedora (and RHL)
systems is to comment out 'if' in /etc/profile that adds
"/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/sbin" only to the path of the superuser:
# Path manipulation
#if [ $EUID = 0 ]; then
pathmunge /sbin
pathmunge /usr/sbin
pathmunge /usr/local/sbin
#fi
Here's my question: Why don't we take that 'if' in the
default /etc/profile, so those directories are in everyone's (default)
PATH? Reasoning:
Users who need it can add the following to their bash ~/.profile file:
export PATH=$PATH:/sbin:/usr/sbin
(or /sbin:/usr/sbin:$PATH )
or create symlinks to what they need in ~/bin/
or create a bashe alias
or ...
There is no need for /sbin, /usr/sbin, /usr/local/sbin
to be in the path of unprivileged user by default.
Users can change that themselves if they need them in their path -
either temporarily or permanently.