Martin Gregorie  writes:
> On Tue, 14 Feb 2017 08:40:25 +0000, Theo wrote:
>> Point of order: it's generally not a good idea to have '.' on your path,
>> because then you risk your system tools being clobbered by ones in the
>> current directory.
>>
> Agreed - if its at the front of the $PATH list. OTOH I see nothing wrong
> with *appending* :~/bin:. to $PATH. Been  doing it for years with no bad
> effects.

The risk here is from typos.

> However, you probably saw my later correction and now know that I meant
> to write ".:/usr/local/etc:/etc" because I was talking about my preferred
> search order when looking for configuration files.
>
> The reason for this preference is because it allows a site configuration
> in /usr/local/etc to override a default configuration in /etc while
> allowing any site-specific configuration to be overridden by a locally
> declared one in the current directory. This can be very useful during
> program development because it lets the special testing configuration(s)
> override the normal configuration.

Testing is normally done by specifying an alternative configuration via
a command-line argument or an environment variable.

For production uses, /etc is not there to provide defaults; it is there
to provide the live configuration.

--
http://www.greenend.org.uk/rjk/

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