On Tue, 11 Jun 2002, Adam D. Barratt wrote: > Non sequiter. /sbin contains, by convention, binaries connected with > system administration. That is *not* the same as "binaries that may > only be executed by root". > > /sbin is not on non-root users' paths, by default, but that doesn't > necessarily mean they can't execute stuff that lives there. Certainly, > on my Debian Woody and Sid boxes here, the contents of /sbin > are -rwxr-xr-x ;- the main thing stopping non-root users using some of > them is a lack of privileges, not a lack of execute rights to the > files. > > Specifically, arp lives in /usr/sbin on my boxen, and whilst that's > not on my normal user's path, and the files are owned by root.root, I > can quite happily: > > /usr/sbin/arp -a > > as any user. Similarly, a non-privileged user has no problems running > /sbin/route.
i would go one step further and suggest that regular users might consider adding /sbin and /usr/sbin to their search paths. there's nothing wrong with that, and it allows users to run the same commands they would be allowed to run if they typed out the names in full: "route" instead of "/sbin/route", for instance. rday
