R P Herrold wrote:
>
> Two lines of code permit a person ignorant of PATH changes to reach
> their ill-advised desire;
But giving root a different and confusingly different environment was a
late and unique branch in history. And unnecessary.
> altering the operating system, so that the
> minimal tools needed for recovery from the single '/' partition would be
> a massive and pervasive changed, and a serious loss. It is a fool's
> errand to do so; it has proved a debating society's pigsty to wallow in.
When small disk drives cost $10,000 and most machines could only be
booted from the vendor-suppied device, there was a reason to care if you
could boot from a tiny partition. That reason is long gone but...
That's not the change being discussed. It is more about combining /sbin
with /bin and /usr/sbin with /usr/bin - or simply giving everyone the
same PATH. There is no sensible reason that a user should wonder why he
can't run ifconfig to get his IP address, or that root shouldn't be able
to find fdisk if he used 'su' instead of 'su -' to get there.
> Discarding culture, ignoring history, and faddishly taking away
> strengths to 'gain share' is the way of vendors and those with an agenda
> to grind; and not the way of those who live in the Unix culture who need
> to work in a long lived stable environment.
You should look at the whole history before saying that. You'll find
that adding the /sbin and /usr/sbin directories was the faddish move in
Solaris, probably because they didn't trust their dynamic-linked
programs and put static-linked utilities there to help recover from
possible problems. I'm not sure who had the bright idea of supplying
different environments to root compared to other users, but I'd bet it
didn't come from the original and elegantly simple unix versions, and it
doesn't play well with the current best practice advice to only switch
to root when needed. Aside from the PATH nonsense, consider what
happens when someone is accustomed to the aliases only in root's
environment accidentally does 'su' instead of 'su -', and wonders why rm
didn't ask if he really wanted to do that.
If you want people to learn to use unix usefully, you have to expose its
simplicity consistently, not disguise it differently under different
circumstances.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell at gmail.com