In article ,
Richard Kettlewell   wrote:
>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.

The big differences here are appending them (so an intruder cannot
stuff in eg. a new ls) and using ~/bin, not ~/ . A local /bin is a place
where you put executables you are in good control of, not some random
stuff in your ~/ . And don't do this as root, but as a normal user, and
I would think you would be pretty safe.

At least some orders of magnitude better than some known office packages
that automatically executes incoming emails.

>> 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.

I concur with both of you, and you are not in such disagreement.

/etc is the global, live configuration of the machine. Updated
via repositories.

/usr/local/etc is for the development and local specialities, to
be updated manually. This is for where the local installation deviates
from what comes with the repositories.

~/etc is for the personal stuff, eg. a newer version, or one
specially built from sources.

-- mrr

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