[dylan604]

The out of order argument doesn't carry much water for me though. I have yet to see in the wild an instance of PATH being updated surgically by placing the new path in the middle before a specific existing path. It's always just tacked onto the end. Maybe I've seen it prepended to the front PATH=/new/path:$PATH.

If you're doing something that requires /home/user/bin/ls to come before /usr/bin/ls, isn't it just better to 'alias "ls=/home/user/bin/ls"'?

[nerdponx]

Kind of. This case is a bit funky, because I tend to use "non-system" package managers like Pkgsrc and Brew, as well as tools like ASDF-VM and Conda. However I don't always install or set up all these tools on all machines.

It all tends to operate in "layers", mostly governed by the sequence of PATH entries. Usually there are too many individual programs to alias, and often which version I want to use is determined dynamically.

Ultimately doing things the way I do them makes sense for me, but it's definitely not very simple and I wouldn't recommend it for most people.