For one user account, I want to have some bash scripts, which of course would be under version control.
The obvious solution is just to put the scripts in a git repository and make ~/bin a symlink to the scripts directory.
Now, it seems on systemd systems ~/.local/bin is supposedly the directory for user scripts.
My question, is mostly, what are the tradeoffs between using ~/bin and ~/.local/bin as directory for my own bash scripts?
One simple scenario I can come up with are 3rd party programs which might modify ~/.local/bin and put their own scripts/starters there, similar to 3rd party applications which put their *.desktop files in ~/.local/applications.
Any advice on this? Is ~/.local/bin safe to use for my scripts or should I stick to the classic ~/bin? Anyone has a better convention?
(Btw.: I am running Debian everywhere, so I do not worry about portability to non systemd Linux systems.)
Solved: Thanks a lot for all the feedback and answering my questions! I’ll settle with having my bash scripts somewhere under ~/my_git_monorepo and linking them to ~/.local/bin to stick to the XDG standard.
I use
~/.local/binsince by linux standard,~/.localis a user-level/usr/local, which is a override level of/usr~/binends up cluttering the home folderAnother reason to use
~/.localis you can do things like./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local make -j$(ncpu) make installAnd then you get your
.local/bin,.local/share,.local/include,.local/liband such, just like/usrbut scoped to your user.and it should mostly just work as well.
And if there’s other users in the machine, it doesn’t fuck things up for others Or if it ends up messing something up, it is user-scoped, so its a lot easier to fix than a bricked system
Prefix can be just $HOME as well.
If I hand write bash scripts, or for those single binary downloads, they’ll go into ~/bin. ~/.local is already used by a ton of packages. This helps a ton when it comes to backups or for just finding where I put stuff.
My ~/.local is
283 GB, it’s where podman/docker/etc put containers, it may as well be a system managed folder at that point. My ~/bin is only120 MBand is a lot simpler to backup/restore/sync to other desktops.In a way it is. But user-level system, as opposed to root-level system.
At that point I’d poke around what’s in there, cuz there’s absolutely a mess in there
It’s really not. Python virtualenv, Steam, libvirt, composer, krita, vulkan, zed, zoxide, systemd, etc. ~/.local is the domain of various installed packages, not my hand crafted scripts.
Another follow up question: Is there any documentation for the linux standard/convention of ~/.local/bin? My initial search about this resulted in nothing which I would call authoritative/definitive.
freedesktop.org defines environment variables that should be used by applications to store their stuff;
[archlinux.org] has a (non-authoritative) summary, but it also provides a [link to the actual specification].
Thank you so much, bookmarked all of your links! :-)
Mostly this, but also, if you’re going to manage many scripts in a system for many users, revision control doesn’t help that. Either look at packaging them properly for your distro, or using something Ansible to distribute and manage their versioning on the system to make things easier on yourself.
Me, packaging company software to Alpine Packages so that I can just
apk add stuffGood practice though. It’s pretty much a necessity anymore with supply chain attacks becoming such a thing.
Can’t have supply chain issues if 90% of your stuff isn’t just a bunch of Docker containers running inside a Kubernetes mess
Not saying that it doesn’t happen on bare metal stuff, but damm, is it a lot more prominent on sources like npm, pip and docker
Well…I mean the biggest obvious example in recent history is the xz-utils hack. There’s probably more like that out in the wild than most want to think about.
Thanks! Do you just put the whole .local/bin under source control, do you link your scripts from somewhere else?