On Tue, Jun 11, 2002 at 05:45:56PM -0400, rpjday wrote:

> 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.

The users who know what they're doing have done that already ;-) And
there is no reason to include this path for the users that don't have
a clue ;-)

Ramin

> rday

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