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by diego_sandoval 732 days ago
Hot take: system commands shouldn't be as accessible as user commands. There should be some sort of namespacing. For example, mkfs should be invoked with `sys::mkfs` or something like that.

The line that separates system and user commands may be defined in different ways, and it may be fuzzy in some places, but if a user accidentally invokes a command that they don't even know why is there, and they didn't explicitly install, then that's clearly a command that shouldn't be directly available in the global namespace.
2 comments
fukawi2 732 days ago
This is the original reason for having /bin vs /sbin

The sbin directories are supposed to contain "system" (or superuser) commands, and regular users should NOT have those directories in their PATH.

This has been broken for a long time on every distribution I've looked at though.

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genewitch 732 days ago
i am unsure if RHEL/Cent did this, but at one of the places i worked you had to do /bin/ls. I expect this is much more common at places that do lots of acquisitions. that way if some random cron job relies on UB from some tool in order to not start the DC on fire, it doesn't matter. Admins use latest tooling, the software gets whatever it came with and was working until actual competent devs can look at it and move it to ansible or whatever puppet/chef i forget what they all used.
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