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Comment by buzer

4 days ago

> Also /bin vs /sbin believe is that the latter is meant for statically linked binaries such that if your system is corrupted these at least will keep working.

My understanding is that sbin for system binaries, not necessarily statically linked. Normally /sbin is only in root's PATH, not normal user's. They are likely world executable, but in many cases you cannot actually run them as non-root since they usually touch things only root can access without special access (e.g. raw devices, privileged syscalls, /etc/shadow etc.). Not always though, like you can run /sbin/ifconfig as normal user in read-only mode.

The s in sbin stood for static initially. Of course nowadays this is not enforced.