🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 2018-06-06, Grant Taylor wrote:
> On 06/06/2018 07:13 AM, Kerr-Mudd,John wrote:
>> Having come from the "simpler" DOS world of total control, with maybe 
>> just a path to c:\utils, I found it a puzzle that there were so many 
>> places (yet only those ones!) to put executables under linux.

It's a bit puzzling, but not a problem in practice.

> You can put executables in a LOT of places.  You just need to choose 
> somewhere that's already in the PATH environment variable, or modify it 
> to your liking.

I'm happy I don't see a lot of software installed under /opt anymore.
That was a pain: often as a user I had to add /opt/$foo/bin to my
$PATH, for each piece of software $foo I was interested in.  And quite
often such software needed other environment variables like $FOO_PATH
too, or it would malfunction.

There's also the issue with documentation.  If a piece of software is
in your path, but the man command cannot find the manual page, you're
in an awkward situation.  man(1) on Linux nowadays has the option to
search for man pages in $foo/man/ if $foo/bin is in the $PATH, but I
think that's a recent improvement.

> I personally have ~/bin first in my path.

It's unclear to me if that's standardized, but yes, I make sure I have
that in my $PATH, too.  It's where all scripts go that are only
interesting to me.

/Jorgen

-- 
  // Jorgen Grahn <grahn@  Oo  o.   .     .
\X/     snipabacken.se>   O  o   .