[pacman-dev] Bash completion

Jeff jeff at kcaccess.com
Thu Feb 25 15:15:46 EST 2010


On Thu, Feb 25, 2010 at 11:31:41AM +1000, Allan McRae wrote:
> >
> >No idea if these paths changed, but there are other tools which are in
> >/usr/bin and not in /bin :
> >expr,seq,sort,find
> >
> >And in /bin we have sed,grep,ls

Of the 7 programs mentioned, only sed and ls are mandated to be in /bin.
However, *every* program called from any distro-specific (i.e. not
user-made) init script that runs prior to mounting /usr becomes mandated
by necessity. Here is the exact rationale for these types of programs
(from the FHS):

<snip>
/bin contains commands that may be used by both the system administrator
and by users, but which are required when no other filesystems are
mounted (e.g. in single user mode). It may also contain commands which
are used indirectly by scripts.
</snip>

That last sentence leaves a lot of room for interpretation which is why
Arch cannot conform to all other distros. They all do things slightly
differently themselves.sed on how they wrote their init scripts. You can
also determine this from the other perspective of what should be in
/usr/bin instead of what should be in /bin. Here's the footnote in the
FHS for /bin:

<snip>
Command binaries that are not essential enough to place into /bin must
be placed in /usr/bin, instead. Items that are required only by non-root
users (the X Window System, chsh, etc.) are generally not essential
enough to be placed into the root partition.
</snip>


-- 
Jeff

My other computer is an abacus.



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