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From: Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.programmer
Subject: Re: Default PATH setting - reduce to something more sensible?
Date: Sun, 19 Jan 2025 13:50:04 +0100
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On 16.01.2025 00:14, Scott Lurndal wrote:
> Janis Papanagnou <janis_papanagnou+ng@hotmail.com> writes:
>>
>> Essentially there were two questions I had that I can reformulate in a
>> more compact form as
>>
>>  "Why, in the first place, are all these path components
>>   part of the default PATH for ordinary users? - Is there
>>   any [functional] rationale or necessity for that?"
> 
> Fundamentally, it's an implementation choice.  For example,
> the Fedora root user  will have
> 
>    /usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin
> 
> as the PATH variable.

Yes, when sudo'ing commands these will also have a restricted
PATH (almost like that) in my Xubuntu environment. That's IMO
a good thing. (And I wished it were similar in the "ordinary
user"'s PATH.)

> 
> Novice users likely never change from the default path,
> and one hopes (absent duplicate command names) that the
> PATH variable places the most likely elements towards
> the front of the list.
> 
> For korn shell, it will remember the element on a hit
> and subsequent invocations of the command will get
> a hit in the shell cache and will not search PATH.
> 
> If one has a custom command that clashes with one in the
> distribution, one can simply include that directory in the
> path before the rest (e.g. /usr/local/sbin above), but I
> wouldn't expect to find that most general linux users
> ever touch PATH.

In the 1990's we used to explicitly specify a well-defined short
PATH at the beginning of shell scripts - primarily for safety
considerations - but, frankly, I got sloppy over the decades in
my personal Unix environments.

> [ NFS snipped ]
> 
>>
>>  "_If_ many of the default PATH components are unnecessary,
>>   where and how to best reduce these settings to a sensible
>>   subset? - Without spoiling the system, of course."
> 
> Iteratively remove elements.  If things don't work, put them back.

The shell configuration components don't seem to be responsible for
PATH entries like '/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm', at least I haven't
found them in any global (less so in local) shell settings.

I should probably just ignore any default path setting and add my
own settings in my shell profiles and/or in my shell scripts.

Janis