ip-up local

[James Wilkinson]

Alexander Dalloz wrote:
> Though /etc is no good place for executive scripts.

Sorry, am I "hearing" you correctly? You don't think executable scripts
should live under /etc, just text based files with settings?

Would you mind justifying that? All the Unix-like operating systems of
which I know put executable scripts in the /etc filesystem: in
particular, the two common init systems (SysV and BSD) rely on a large
number of executable scripts there. BSD init puts them directly in
/etc.

Or do you just think that they should all be in subdirectories of /etc,
not in /etc itself? Fedora *nearly* does that (on my system, autofs
breaks that rule[1]), which is largely due to the preference of putting
stuff in subdirectories of /etc if the program is complicated enough to
need multiple files in /etc. Which *is* a good one: there's enough
under /etc as it is...

But I thought that was just a side-effect, not something to be aimed at:
I don't think I've ever come across a rule which says "no executable
stuff in /etc"

A few figures:
on a random AIX box:
/etc$ find . -type f -perm -1 2>/dev/null | wc -l
     162
/etc$ ls -l |egrep ^-..x | wc -l
      27

on this Fedora box:
[james at howells etc]$ find . -type f -perm -1 2>/dev/null | wc -l
493
[james at howells etc]$ ls -l |egrep ^-..x | wc -l
2

on a random SUSE box:
$ find . -type f -perm -1 2>/dev/null | wc -l
    124
$ ls -l |egrep ^-..x | wc -l
      1

(Errm: the numbers are the numbers of executable files in the /etc
filesystem and directly in /etc, respectively...)

Thanks,

James.

[1] And cdrecord.conf: I'm not sure why that has to be executable...
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