I often use this way to make my executable appear in terminal. Is it good or bad? And why?
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1What is "your executable"? A program of your own? Do you share the system with other users?– slhckDec 18, 2012 at 7:25
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I mean file that can be execute, may be downloaded program or anything else. And I don't share my system with others.– Amp TanawatDec 18, 2012 at 7:28
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2 Answers
There's nothing wrong with leaving a symlink to an executable in /bin. In fact, it could be a very clean way of managing your executables, compared to putting every single executable's path in your $PATH.
So, instead of having, for example, /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin in your $PATH, you'd have /home/user/foo/bin:/home/user/bar/bin:/yet/another/bin:/usr/local/bin, etc. which would be hard to maintain. Plus, you'd have to set up your custom path for all shells, whereas simply putting the symlink into /bin makes it available to any shell right away.
But this is your choice. Often, programs will have to have a FOO_HOME variable set, pointing to their directory, e.g. TOMCAT_HOME, which contains a bin directory of its own.
Maybe you should consider using /usr/bin instead of /bin, because the latter is usually reserved for essential system binaries that are available to all users, and /usr/bin is for non-essential binaries.
Even better would be to use /usr/local/bin, since /usr/local is the default place for anything you've installed yourself, as a user—so anything that is not part of a default system installation. If /usr/local/bin is not in your $PATH, you should of course add it.
To find out more about the directory organization, read the Filesystem Hierarchy Standard.
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+1 for /usr/local/bin. The /bin and /usr/bin directories should be maintained by the package manager, /usr/local/bin should be used for programs installed manually, and useful shell scripts. Dec 18, 2012 at 9:42
/bin is used for executables used by the kernel. /usr/bin/ Is I think for your distibutions package manager. You can freely add links to your executables to /usr/local/bin which is typically where software that you compile would install themselves with a make install
The ideal method is to add ~/bin to your path, create that folder in your home directory and just use that folder.
Of course all this is mostly about neatness, elegance, correctness, etc. I cant think of a reasonable technical flaw in linking directly to /bin as long as you do it correctly with no mistakes ever.
