🚀 go-pugleaf

On Wed, 2018-06-06, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> Jorgen Grahn <grahn...@snipabacken.se> writes:
>>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.
>
> All man utilities have supported $MANPATH since basically forever.

Yes, but that was not what I was talking about -- I was talking about
when man(1) also reads $PATH.

>>> 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.
>
> It only needs to be at the _front_ of $PATH if you intend to
> override utilities of the same name that exist under earlier
> entries in $PATH.

I was going to comment on that, but didn't bother.  I put ~/bin
last in my path; seems to me overriding a standard utility would
almost always be the wrong solution to a problem.

/Jorgen

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