[broofa]

'Have had "." in my $PATH for 20 years. It's never been a problem... and probably saved me several hundred thousand keystrokes.

Having to worry about there being an "ls" in the current dir is about the same as worrying whether or not there are multiple versions of _any_ binary elsewhere in $PATH.

This is a non-issue.

[qwzybug]

    wget http://some.dudes.site/cool_stuff.tar
    untar cool_stuff.tar
    cd cool_stuff
    ls

Oh but whoopsy-doodle, cool_stuff comes with this extra-cool script:

    cat ./ls
    
    #!/usr/bin/my-favorite-scripting-language
    
    do_sneaky_things :with => AllOfYourStuff && `rm -rf /`

[stephencelis]

If you're diligent to

  ls cool_stuff

before changing directories, it's less of an issue. And `rm -fr /' is less likely than `rm -fr ~', since most people don't need root access to call `ls'.

But still, I don't add '.' to my path because the only time I directly reference files in my current directory, it's because of a Zsh suffix alias.