> /sbin, /usr/sbin is for binaries that need root. You put them in separate directories so their permissions all match up, and so they don't show up when completing in bash.
I also got this explanation, but it never made much sense to me. First of all, the binaries there are executable by everyone anyway. Second, it really doesn't matter that they show up during completion. Third, many of them work fine and are quite useful without root! I don't recall the specific examples that bothered me (/sbin and /usr/sbin have been in my PATH forever now), but I think it was something like ifconfig or ping.
>Third, many of them work fine and are quite useful without root
It's more complicated than that - many can do a subset of useful things without root.
Often they can read things as a normal user - things like `apt` or `sysctl` can show you information about your current system, but will only be able to change it as root.
And even something like "shutdown" might be usable for a locally logged in normal user on a systemd system - or it might not be, depending on local configuration.
Finding things that actually always "need root" for everything is kind of hard, even discounting "print help" as a useful thing in its own right. And if you only came up with "chcpu" and "switch_root"... would you really want to have a top-level directory just for those? Plus the historical ___location for some things is in /sbin, so moving them out has a compatibility cost.
Tbh I find the only winning move here is not to play. There are so few binaries that are actually only useful to root that they don't really hurt in tab completion, and they could always grow non-root accessible features.
Yes, but you are effectively turning your box into a single user system. And that's fine if you are happy to work that way, but the origins of the directory structure is of course in multiuser UNIX. As a sysadmin, I would not want my /bin /sbin exposed to everyone. In your example I question the security implications of being able to run those binaries outside of root anyway (esp. in a professional environment) if you have your box exposed on a network.
> As a sysadmin, I would not want my /bin /sbin exposed to everyone.
Why not? It's not like most of them are suid (right?). Most Unix systems I've used allow any user to peruse /sbin at their leisure and run whatever they want.
Yes of course, just like on more or less any Linux system. But IIRC, shutdown is a suid binary that will do its own permission checks while running. The permissions on the /sbin/ directory should not matter.
I also got this explanation, but it never made much sense to me. First of all, the binaries there are executable by everyone anyway. Second, it really doesn't matter that they show up during completion. Third, many of them work fine and are quite useful without root! I don't recall the specific examples that bothered me (/sbin and /usr/sbin have been in my PATH forever now), but I think it was something like ifconfig or ping.