Comment by gjvc

10 hours ago

bad example in the article:

  export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin/"

better:

  export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin/:$PATH"

11 comments

gjvc

Reply
Backslasher  10 hours ago

Afaik it's habit to give system paths precedence so a malicious script can't shadow e.g. sudo and steal your password, escalating a local file write into root

  • toast0  10 hours ago

    Otoh, if you don't put your local path first, you can't override system binaries that you want to override.

    Also, if something can write into your path, it can probably write to your shell config and/or the environment variables.

  • 3eb7988a1663  4 hours ago

    All sorts of utilities push themselves to the front of path: uv, mise, asdf, python virtual environments, nix shell, etc.

    It is a theoretically nice ideal that fails immediately when you want project specific overrides.

    • jdxcode  3 hours ago

      That’s not true with mise. You can add something to the front of PATH in front of mise bins and mise will respect that.

  • paulddraper  10 hours ago

    AFAIK it's habit to allow your scripts to override system ones, so you can customize behavior.

    I've always seen home dir, homebrew, etc prepending to PATH.

  • marcosdumay  8 hours ago

    That's important only for the people that add relative names (like '.') to their path.

    Most people know better.

  • gjvc  8 hours ago

    by that time it's too late and should have been prevented appearing on the host much earlier