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Comment by gjvc | Hacker News Reader

bad example in the article:

  export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin/"

better:

  export PATH="$HOME/.local/bin/:$PATH"

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Afaik it's habit to give system paths precedence so a malicious script can't shadow e.g. sudo and steal your password, escalating a local file write into root

AFAIK it's habit to allow your scripts to override system ones, so you can customize behavior.

I've always seen home dir, homebrew, etc prepending to PATH.

Otoh, if you don't put your local path first, you can't override system binaries that you want to override.

Also, if something can write into your path, it can probably write to your shell config and/or the environment variables.

Why would you want to override system binaries

Often, system binaries are ancient

Are you a MacOS user by any chance?

Overriding them with path is often a bad idea though unless you are 100% sure about backwards compatibility as this will also mean scripts and other programs will pick up your versions. If you just want the new versions for yourself, aliases in your .bashrc or equivalent is safer.

by that time it's too late and should have been prevented appearing on the host much earlier

That's important only for the people that add relative names (like '.') to their path.

Most people know better.

All sorts of utilities push themselves to the front of path: uv, mise, asdf, python virtual environments, nix shell, etc.

It is a theoretically nice ideal that fails immediately when you want project specific overrides.

That’s not true with mise. You can add something to the front of PATH in front of mise bins and mise will respect that.

the way python virtual environments have been explained to people has caused as much damage to python as the 2 to 3 transition

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