On Tuesday 10 July 2007 18:42, Wojciech Florek wrote:
> >
> > $ which acroread
> > /usr/bin/acroread
> >
> > $ ls -l /usr/bin/acroread
> > lrwxrwxrwx  1 root root 40 Jul 12  2006 /usr/bin/acroread ->
> > usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin/acroread
>
> It is done in order not to mess a "local" binary with system binaries
> placed (mainly) in /usr/bin.

Umm. In actuality system utility binaries are _not_ in /usr/bin, they're 
in /usr/sbin unless they're needed in system maintainance mode in which case 
look in /sbin (the separation is done to make the file system which _has_ to 
be mounted as small as possible)

/bin and /usr/bin as opposed to /sbin and /usr/sbin are for utilities likely 
to be used by all users.

acroread would be a non-linux program so (assuming all users are to be able to 
exec it) it should be in /usr/local/bin 

If the Adobe installer wants to create its own directory tree it should have 
linked /usr/local/bin/acroread to /usr/local/Adobe/Acrobat7.0/bin/acroread
>
> Question and answer is simple.
>    If you are going to use any "prog" only yourself - put in /home/xxx/bin
> and add this directory to PATH.

Sounds the sensible thing to me. Especially as many versions of linux already 
have ~/bin in the path; mine puts at at the beginning of the string! (Don't 
forget that ~ is a synonym for the home directory of the current user)

>    If "prog" has to be available to other users

A recipe for cache-thrashing hell in the case of mprime
>
> In both cases "prog" has to use _current_ not _executable_ dir to avoid
> mixing files of different users.
>
Precisely.

Where the application can (sensibly) be used by more than one user and has 
files it needs to share between them, the sensible thing to do is to create a 
new environmental variable to point to the shared data directory.

Regards
Brian Beesley
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