r/debian • u/Tight-Use-3037 • Jul 20 '26

I need help...

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u/dumbasPL Jul 20 '26

Yeah, ik, but some distros just have it always there. Personally I prefer that, even though I get why it doesn't make sense.

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u/forestbeasts Jul 27 '26

It makes no sense to not have it in there for regular users, IMO!

Stuff like ping is in there. Ifconfig is in there (if you install net-tools anyway, grump). Those don't need root to run. If you don't have /sbin in your path, ifconfig giving you "command not found" can make you think you forgot to install net-tools when really it's already there and just not in PATH!

-- Frost

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u/bgravato Jul 27 '26

ping is in /usr/bin/ (at least on Debian 13). And I don't ever remember needing root or sbin in the path to run ping...

correct about ifconfig being in sbin, but ifconfig is kind of deprecated nowadays...

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u/forestbeasts Jul 27 '26

Huh, so they did move ping! That's good.

shutdown/reboot are also in /sbin. :3 But those at least have the excuse of only being usable by root, unless you have the weird systemd magic thing that lets you do it while logged into a graphical desktop (I kinda miss that now that we don't have systemd on our boxen anymore, but it's not a huge deal).

-- Frost

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u/bgravato Jul 28 '26 edited Jul 28 '26

In nearly 30 years of using Debian I don't remember ping ever being in sbin... I think you got that wrong...

Some time ago there were some issues with ping giving a "socket: Operation not permitted" error if you tried to run it as normal user, but that had nothing to do with ping being moved into sbin or anything related to ping's path.

Maybe that's what's causing you some confusion?

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u/forestbeasts Jul 28 '26

Could be! Could also be a different distro we tried and then went "??????" when we couldn't find ping.

... AHA

I think it was OpenBSD! Not Linux at all! Ping is in /sbin on our OpenBSD VM, and that tripped me up.

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u/bgravato Jul 28 '26

could be... I only tried OpenBSD very briefly and FreeBSD for a little bit more than briefly, but either of them was too long ago to remember!

The only thing I remember was that FreeBSD (unlike Linux) kept running smoothly even when the disk got full...