this post was submitted on 11 Apr 2024
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$PATH is very useful for wrapper scripts, without it there wouldn't be an easy way to for fix the mess that steam does in my homedir that places a bunch of useless dotfiles in it. The trick is simply have a script with the same name as the steam binary in a location that is first in $PATH therefore it will always be called first before steam can start and murder my home again.
About /var/tmp, I just have it symlinked to /tmp, technically /var/tmp still has a reason to exist, as that location is use for temporary files that you don't want to lose on power loss, but I actually went over the list possible issues and iirc it was mostly some cache files of vim.
EDIT: Also today several distros symlink /bin and /sbin to /usr/bin.
You missed my point. The reason $PATH exists in the first place is because binaries were too large to fit on a single disk, so they were scattered around multiple partitions (
/bin,/sbin,/usr/bin, etc...). Now, all your binaries can easily fit on a single partition (weirdly enough,/usr/binwas chosen as the "best candidate" for it), but we still have all the other locations, symlinked there. It just makes no sense.As for the override mechanism you mention, there are much better tools nowadays to do that (overlayfs for example).
This is what plan9 does for example. There is no need for
$PATHbecause all binaries are in/binanyways. And to override a binary, you simply "mount" it over the existing one in place.Because a lot of shit would break if that wasn't the case, starting with every shell script that has the typical
#!/bin/shor#!/bin/bashshebang.Does that need elevated privileges? Because with PATH what you do is export this environment variable with the order you want, like this:
export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"(And this location is part of the xdg base dir spec btw).This means that my home bin directory will always be first in PATH, and for the steam example it means that I don't have to worry about having to add/change the script every time the system updates, etc.
Also what do you mean by mounting a binary over? I cannot replace the steam binary in this example. What I'm doing is using a wrapper script that launches steam on a different location instead (and also passes some flags that makes steam launch silently).
I'm not saying we should get rid of
$PATHright now. My point is that it was created to solve a problem we don't have anymore (not enough disk capacity), but we still keep it out of habit.As a reminder, the discussion is about what should be rewritten from scratch in linux. And IMO, we should get rid of
$PATHas there are better options.