On Mon, Dec 20, 1999 at 08:17:31AM +0000, Marc Haber wrote:
> On 19 Dec 1999 13:11:27 -0800, you wrote:
> >There are undoubtedly more examples, but I know traceroute is The
> >Biggy. It's a major tool that users run all the time, and there's no
> >reason for it to be in /usr/sbin.
> [...] Average users know how to use a
> few programs they have to work with and don't care about IP routing
> and that stuff. Who needs traceroute, probably needs other
> "administration" tools as well (although these people almost never
> have root access) and are better off with sbin in their paths.
Note that traceroute is a network diagnostic tool: it doesn't actually
change the local setup at all (as compared to, say, ifconfig). Note that
related programs, such as ping, fping, and nc are all in /usr/bin. Note
that traceroute is setuid, and thus that there's no particular value to
running it as root versus running it as a user (again, as compared to
things like ifconfig, or modprobe). And it's not even a particularly
common program to be used in scripts (well, nowhere near as common as
ifconfig, anyway).
In short: there's a particularly good case to be made for that particular
program to be moved to bin. It's not one that extends to lots of other
tools, like ifconfig, or adduser, or whatever, though.
Personally, I don't have sbin in my PATH as a user: that means I get a
`command not found' error when I try to sysadminy things when I'm not
root. I find that quite pleasant. OTOH, I have a symlink to traceroute
from /usr/local/bin. But please stop telling me I'd be much happier if
I just stuck sbin in my PATH. I wouldn't.
Cheers,
aj, who wouldn't mind if traceroute moved, but is really quite happy with
where everything else is
--
Anthony Towns <aj@humbug.org.au> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/>
I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG encrypted mail preferred.
``The thing is: trying to be too generic is EVIL. It's stupid, it
results in slower code, and it results in more bugs.''
-- Linus Torvalds
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