It may be arcane knowledge to most users of UNIX-like systems today, but there is supposed to be a difference between /usr/bin and /usr/sbin; the latter is supposed to be for “system binaries”, not needed by most normal users. The Filesystem Hierarchy Standard states that sbin directories are intended to contain “utilities used for system administration (and other root-only commands)”, which is quite vague when you think about it. This has led to UNIX-like systems basically just winging it, making the distinction almost entirely arbitrary.
For a long time, there has been no strong organizing principle to /usr/sbin that would draw a hard line and create a situation where people could safely leave it out of their $PATH. We could have had a principle of, for example, “programs that don’t work unless run by root”, but no such principle was ever followed for very long (if at all). Instead programs were more or less shoved in /usr/sbin if developers thought they were relatively unlikely to be used by normal people. But ‘relatively unlikely’ is not ‘never’, and shortly after people got told to ‘run traceroute’ and got ‘command not found’ when they tried, /usr/sbin (probably) started appearing in $PATH.
↫ Chris Siebenmann
As such, Fedora 42 unifies /usr/bin and /usr/sbin, which is kind of a follow-up to the /usr merge, and serves as a further simplification and clean-up of the file system layout by removing divisions and directories that used to make sense, but no longer really do. Decisions like these have a tendency to upset a small but very vocal group of people, people who often do not even use the distribution implementing the decisions in question in the first place. My suggestions to those people would be to stick to distributions that more closely resemble classic UNIX.
Or use a real UNIX.
Anyway, these are good moves, and I’m glad most prominent Linux distributions are not married to decisions made in the ’70s, especially not when they can be undone without users really noticing anything.
This is what I “love” (i.e. hate) about Desktop Linux:
– Can’t decide which binaries are core and non-core? Eliminate the separation and put them all in /usr
– Can’t agree to put the non-root binaries in bin and the root binaries in sbin? Eliminate the separation and put everything in bin.
And while I am willing to give them the benefit of the doubt for the first one (deciding what is “core” and “non-core” can be tough), the second one is just idiotic. A tool either needs root to work at all or it doesn’t.
This is what you get when you have too many neckbeards and graybeards with opinions™ spread across multiple organizations/distros and no boss to enforce a single decision.
I like sbin, and in T2/Linux we even still maintain the split of system core things in / and non vital things in /usr. If I were to remove and join anything that it would be getting rid of /usr entirely. and only use /bin,/sbin, …
Short answer — /usr/sbin (and /usr/local/sbin) should be where to place commands that require you to “sudo”.