Just noticed this on a clean Fedora 12 install (that I’ll talk about later).


[andrew@Callandra ~]$ echo $PATH
/usr/lib/qt-3.3/bin:/usr/kerberos/sbin:/usr/kerberos/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/home/andrew/bin

Compare that to the default Ubuntu paths:

home@racetrack:~$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games


Ubuntu are right here, and Fedora is very wrong (much as it hurts me to have to say that). The point of the path is that default applications can be overridden at every level. Start from the back end, /bin. I may as the network administrator put a program of the same name (packaged) into /usr/bin to make it the default for system users. Similarly, as a local administrator I may want to put custom software, wrappers etc., into /usr/local/bin so they appear before the packaged defaults. As an end user, I might want to use my homedir to do similar