Hi all I have a quick question. Is it better for my zsh shell to be in /usr/bin/zsh or /bin/zsh. I remember reading that one of them would mess up the whole system since zsh is not posix compliant. I believe that szh shouldn’t be set as the root shell. I now have it in /usr/bin/zsh, is that good? So now when I drop into a root shell I don’t get they autocompletion feature that zsh has. I’d also lose that fancy theme. Does that mean my root shell is still bash? Thanks

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
    15·
    1 year ago

    Depends on your distro. Various distros are merging /bin into /usr/bin (as you may expect, Debian members have been fighting about this for a while).

    In the end it’s all just preferences and conventions. If you want to put zsh in /var/spool/mail/bin/ then you should. As long as you include the path in the necessary $PATH variables (and probably make sure ACLs are set alright) it really doesn’t matter for your personal system.

    POSIX compliance sounds like a weird argument. Any script will have a shebang (#!/bin/env sh) to pick the interpreter they prefer. sh usually means bash because of assumptions, but unless you go out of your way, these scripts will not be run through zsh.

      • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
        1·
        1 year ago

        On my machine /bin/env, /usr/bin/env, and /usr/sbin/env are all hard-linked to the same file. Probably because every distro puts it some place else and the Manjaro folks just like to be compatible :)

          • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
            1·
            1 year ago

            Sure, things usually put env in /usr/bin, but there’s no guarantee for that. All standards like POSIX guarantee is that the standard PATH contains certain binaries.

            Hardcoding /usr/bin/env is probably your best bet, but hardcoding any path is making assumptions that POSIX complaint shells don’t guarantee.

            That’s why #!env is probably your best bet, but people hate shebangs without absolute paths.

            • _cnt0@lemmy.villa-straylight.social
              1·
              1 year ago

              Sure, things usually put env in /usr/bin, but there’s no guarantee for that.

              There is even less guarantee for it to be anywhere else.

              Hardcoding /usr/bin/env is probably your best bet

              Because it is the convention.

              That’s why #!env is probably your best bet

              It definitely isn’t. That might work in your user space instance of bash in the desktop, but will likely fail in a script invoked during boot, and is guaranteed to fail on several non-gnu/non-linux systems.

              #!/usr/bin/envis the agreed convention and there is no probably or but about that. If that does not work on a system it is a bug (looking at you BusyBox containers 🤨).