Andrew Cady wrote: > > A little research reveals that the original AT&T Unix contained no > /sbin; however, the traditional contents of /sbin were present in /etc, > mixed with configuration files. 4.3BSD placed these files in /etc also, > but 4.4BSD moved them to /sbin, reserving /etc for configuration files > only. > > Apparently the BSD folks decided in retrospect that mixing binaries with > configuration was a bad idea. But why not put them in /bin?
Just a guess, but a lot of the commands in /sbin require root privileges. If you put them in a separate place you can exclude them from a user's path. The same goes for /usr/sbin I suppose. It's not perfect though: /sbin/ifconfig is very useful to non-root users, but it's not in the path. Another example would be /sbin/lsmod (which a non-root user would need to get help on the mailing lists ;-) -- George Borisov DXSolutions Ltd
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