Re: ~/bin at front or end of path (ubuntu .profile)

In article <gtcf75$a93$1@xxxxxxxx>, pk <pk@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Thursday 30 April 2009 17:02, sandypittendrigh wrote:

On Apr 30, 9:00 am, salmobytes <Sandy.Pittendr...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
The default bash .profile on my ubuntu box looks for -d ~/bin
If there .profile puts ~/bin at the head of the path with:
PATH="~/bin:${PATH}

....shouldn't it be the other way around?
Don't you want name conflicts to go to system commands, rather
than to poorly-named user scripts?

Well, that depends on your point of view. If you want to override system
commands with your versions (or with wrapper scripts) that you put in
~/bin, then having ~/bin searched before other system paths is probably
what you want.
If on the other hand you don't want that, you can always change it of
course.

I think the arguement should be, from a sys admin POV, that the system
should put it at the end, which will protect naive users from
themselves. That's generally the prime directive of a sys admin - to
protect naive users from themselves.

Sophisticated users who write wrappers and/or want to override the
system defaults, can, of course, change it themselves.

Note that whoever put your distribution together seems not to agree with
me on this.

.