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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).

Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.

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Solved: ~/bin vs. ~/.local/bin for user bash scripts? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I've tried both and ~/.local/bin tends to be used by a bunch of tools to install their own binaries/scripts so depending on what you use it can become very messy (which did happen in my case). I used to have a ~/Documents/Scripts directory in my $PATH and that was much cleaner than my current setup so that's what I'd recommend, especially if you want to use Git with it! :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 day ago

Thank you very much! I was exactly looking for someone telling me that some tools install their own binaries/scripts to ~/.local/bin.

Most probably I'll just symlink my scripts from ~/.local/bin then, this would avoid troubles with 3rd partys and most of my dotfiles are symlinked anyway, so the infrastructure is there.