> From: [email protected] [mailto:discuss-
> [email protected]] On Behalf Of Jonathan Bayer
> 
> Anyone know why that is so?  I don't see anything in those directories
> which aren't system binaries or something used by an adminiatrator aka
> root user.

Why is it on the path?  Because someone at redhat decided to make it so.  
Simple as that.
Different question:  Why did they decide to make it so?  I don't know (I wasn't 
there) but I'm sure glad they finally did.

Leaving sbin off the path doesn't improve security or reliability.  If there's 
something users shouldn't do, it needs to be permission protected, not just 
obscured because they didn't know "fdisk" was a thing they could type by 
accident.  There are some extremely common utilities there, such as ping, 
fuser, lsof.  Even ifconfig and vgdisplay have some good use cases for normal 
users.

Also, suppose you want to do "sudo ifconfig" ...  guess what.  Doesn't work 
unless sbin is on your path.  You should almost never do anything as root.  
Therefore, you need sbin on your path for sudo.  There is no general way for 
/etc/bashrc to make the distinction between users who can do something in sudo 
or not, and add sbin to the path of sudo users.

Formerly, I always modified /etc/bashrc (and friends) to add sbin to regular 
users' paths.  Thankfully, not so anymore.
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