On Tue 21 Aug 2018 at 14:48:25 (+0200), to...@tuxteam.de wrote: > On Tue, Aug 21, 2018 at 08:02:02AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > > [...] > > > Odd, maybe apt does not look in $PATH? > > There's no reason to assume that, unless when looking for an executable > (i.e. those things which tend to live in /bin and /usr/bin).
… and then it will of course be hashed, and so waste no time at all. But Gene's mention of $PATH was a complete red herring. Or cargo cult. And consider this: it would be seriously mental to place downloaded files, which might even have been obtained from untrusted sources, and stick them in your $PATH ready for execution. > Actually, dpkg's man page mentions $PATH, but only for searching > executables, which is to be expected. Not for searching packages. Yes, and I think one can see why dpkg explicitly mentions $PATH. It uses a lot of helper programs for unpacking archives, computing MD5s, etc, and $PATH is where they're expected to be. Expected, but people using dpkg from the commandline might well have seriously broken systems with missing or incompatible binaries, and --force-bad-path attempts to deal with that. > To me, it would be a surprise. IMO it would be a grave bug in the Debian project's thinking. Cheers, David.
