FHS discuss people: where should traceroute go? Tradition dictates /usr/sbin, the FHS seems to indicate /usr/bin would be more appropriate.
On Wed, Aug 16, 2000 at 07:22:26PM +1000, Herbert Xu wrote: > Blindly following a contradictory standard is only going to get us into > trouble later on. > > Just to rephrase my main reason for not moving traceroute, it's a tool that > is in the same category as ping/ifconfig/route, i.e., it's a network > diagnostic tool. `ifconfig' and `ping' aren't really in the same category, though. ifconfig (like route, mount, and like modprobe or lsmod) acts on local hardware, whereas ping (like traceroute, and arguably telnet or nc) is commonly used as a tool to investigate distant sites. Toying with local stuff is the system administrator's playground, by definition, but investigating remote hosts is a reasonable thing to expect both admins and users to do. This seems to me to match at least the spirit of the FHS's definition of sbin: ] Deciding what things go into "sbin" directories is simple: If a normal ] (not a system administrator) user will ever run it directly, then it ] should be placed in one of the "bin" directories. Ordinary users should ] not have to place any of the sbin directories in their path. This definition is really quite poor if you put too much emphasis on the "ever". "swapon", for example, is clearly a tool for the admin, but a user might decide one day to run it just see which version of the program is installed on the system. mount, and ifconfig are less extreme versions of the same thing: a normal user can't use it to actually *do* anything, just to find out something about the way the system's setup, which is something of an admin task. ping and traceroute, by contrast are almost completely as useful for a normal user as root. > On Linux, ping has traditionally been in /bin while the > other three have always lived in /sbin and /usr/sbin, respectively. This is probably enough reason for the FHS to explicitly state where traceroute should go, since /usr/sbin seems in conflict with the earlier definition of sbin. > Unless > there is a very good reason (for the convenience of users who should really > be changing their PATH variable is not good enough IMHO), we shouldn't move > these things around as LOCAL scripts may depend on them. Similarly for /var/mail, /usr/lib/sendmail, /usr/doc, and so on, albeit perhaps to a lesser extent. Cheers, aj -- Anthony Towns <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> <http://azure.humbug.org.au/~aj/> I don't speak for anyone save myself. GPG signed mail preferred. ``We reject: kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and working code.'' -- Dave Clark
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