[yocto] Adding 'sbin' to default path

[Paul Eggleton]

Hi Ash,

On Friday 30 January 2015 10:28:21 Ash Charles wrote:
> Why does the PATH variable in the dot.bashrc shipped by the base-files
> not include 'sbin' paths?  It seems like any interactive user should
> be able to call e.g. 'ifconfig' informationally---they should, and
> would still be, blocked from calling 'ifconfig eth0 up'
> 
> After looking at the PATH for a generic user on my local Ubuntu
> system, I just added a patch to my meta layer to add the following
> line to the dot.bashrc:
> 
> export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin
> 
> It seems to work well---users created with the extrauser class pull
> this default from the skel.
> 
> As this is security related though, I wanted to ask the question to
> make sure I'm not doing something silly, dangerous or otherwise
> idiotic.

I think this is largely a distro decision - some distros include the sbin 
directories to PATH for all users (e.g. Fedora), others reserve that for root 
only (e.g. Debian) on the assumption that everything in /sbin and /usr/sbin is 
intended for administration rather than normal users. I guess we are just 
picking up the default from base-files which comes from Debian.

Cheers,
Paul

-- 

Paul Eggleton
Intel Open Source Technology Centre