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On Wed, Nov 25, 2015 at 07:51:55PM +0100, Ulrich Mueller wrote: |
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> >>>>> On Wed, 25 Nov 2015, William Hubbs wrote: |
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>> From what I've read, the traditional difference between bin and sbin |
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>> was that sbin means static-bin and everything stored in there was to |
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>> be able to come up without libraries. |
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> |
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> Source/reference for this? |
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Some of us are old enough to remember when it happened, sonny. It was |
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Sun's idea. Disks were expensive, so they wanted as much of the OS to be |
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mountable read-only via NFS as possible (remember diskless workstations? |
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no, you probably don't), so they moved /bin and /lib to /usr and replaced |
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them with symlinks. /sbin was created to hold the necessary binaries |
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to get /usr mounted via NFS at boot. They had to be statically-linked |
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because all the shared libraries were in /usr-- hence the "s" in "sbin". |
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If you really want a reference, here you go (page 7): |
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http://chiclassiccomp.org/docs/content/computing/Sun/800-1731-10_SunOS4.0ChangeNotes9May88.pdf |
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>> As mgorny was talking about earlier, a good chunk of what is in sbin |
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>> *can* be run by normal users. |
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> |
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> Then it shouldn't be in sbin, in the first place. That's a separate |
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> discussion though. |
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Bollocks. The whole "/sbin is for admins" meme is an after-the-fact |
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fabrication by those too young to remember the original purpose for it. |
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(Unfortunately, that included people at Sun.) |
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Now, get off my lawn. |
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