Good place to keep shell scripts?

Question

I was just wondering - where do you usually put your shell scripts? or perl or python scripts for that matter?

Is /usr/local/scripts ok? or /opt ?

Answer 1

I drop everything in $HOME/bin, and append it to my $PATH, by placing

PATH=$PATH:~/bin

in .bashrc.

Answer 2

For system-wide use, I would put them in /usr/local/bin. For per-account use, I'd put them in $HOME/bin as withoutasound suggests.

Answer 3

I have them in their own git repo. As soon as they are reasonably polished, I use a script to symlink them to ~/bin.

Answer 4

I put them in a dedicated directory under /var/tmp for at least three reasons:

• It isn't related to any specific account
• I can always (on regular Unix systems) create a directory there even without administrative rights
• It normally survives a reboot

Of course, sometimes eager cleaning scripts wipe that directory off but I can easily reinstall it anyway.

For packaged stuff, I always used /opt/ as it is a standard. /usr/local/bin has several pitfalls.