On Sunday 01 April 2007, Peter Volkov wrote: > Hello. > > Path of some utilities in coreutils-6.7-r1 changed from /usr/bin to /bin > and vice versa. This cause some scripts became broken as they relied on > the full path to executable. The question is: does there exist best > practice on how to avoid this problem in future? Traditionally, all programs needed to boot the machine into single-user mode, together with an editor, were placed in /bin or /sbin. This allowed an administrator to do simple tasks such as simple editing of files in /etc, checking and repairing filesystems, etc.. without having any other partitions being mounted.
Now-a-days it's probably all a bit moot because we have have bootable CDs and not as important as it used to be, but I am profoundly irritated when I find that when I boot to single user mode on Gentoo/Linux that I have to unmount my non-/ partitions to file check them, and then - even more irritating - have to remember to remount them in order to get a clean reboot, even worse is that vi is unavailable when you are repair mode because it is in /usr/bin. Thus one has to make do with ed. :-( > Should we set some > default PATH in scripts or should we call "command -p program"? Or as > this is mainly problem for scripts that work in cron we should suggest > users to set PATH in crontab? Or may be we should fix coreutils to > create all possible symlinks? -- CS -- gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list
