Re: [Ltib] skell-1.13 should have a slightly different PATH in /etc/profile

[Stuart Hughes]

On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 14:15 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> On Thu, 18 Dec 2008, Stuart Hughes wrote:
> 
> > Hi Robert,
> >
> > That's a good idea, I'll put that in my list of things to update.
> >
> > Regards, Stuart
> >
> > On Thu, 2008-12-18 at 10:29 -0500, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> > >   i just noticed the contents of /etc/profile in skell-1.13 regarding
> > > the default search path:
> > >
> > >   PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin
> > >
> > > the problem with this path is that it doesn't give users the freedom
> > > to override some of the standard system utilities with any of their
> > > locally-written ones since /usr/local/bin is at the end.
> > >
> > >   a more flexible choice would be:
> > >
> > >   PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
> > >
> > > which keeps the system utilities at the front, but allows installation
> > > of alternates in /usr/local/bin to override standard programs.  not a
> > > big deal, of course, but the second PATH would be more in line with
> > > what you'd find in common linux distros.
> > >
> > > rday
> 
>   maybe not such a good idea after all.  it naturally requires you to
> be able to customize your search path when you log in and, at the
> moment, i'm connecting via busybox's telnetd with:
> 
>   /usr/sbin/telnetd -l /bin/sh
> 
> and i can't seem to customize the root login search path to add the
> local directories.  and if i can't do that, this idea is pretty much
> dead in the water.
> 
>   i've tried editing /etc/profile and that doesn't have any effect.
> thoughts?
> 

I think there are 2 issue here.

* What the default PATH entry should be (the most used convention I
guess).  Which one do you think is best? 

* Does telnetd have a problem.

I didn't quite follow what you meant about telnetd.  Maybe you could
elaborate a little.  You probably have tried, but did you
investigate /root/.profile, /root/.login.  It might be worth taking a
look in the busybox telnetd code to see what it sources when it starts
and/or ash to see what it does.

Regards, Stuart