Solved: ~/bin vs. ~/.local/bin for user bash scripts?

a year ago by wolf to c/linux

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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AkatsukiLevi 53 points a year ago

I use ~/.local/bin since by linux standard, ~/.local is a user-level /usr/local, which is a override level of /usr

~/bin ends up cluttering the home folder

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Max_P 30 points a year ago

Another reason to use ~/.local is you can do things like

./configure --prefix=$HOME/.local
make -j$(ncpu)
make install

And then you get your .local/bin, .local/share, .local/include, .local/lib and such, just like /usr but scoped to your user.

and it should mostly just work as well.

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AkatsukiLevi 8 points a year ago

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

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atzanteol 0 points a year ago

Prefix can be just $HOME as well.

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BaconIsAVeg 6 points a year ago

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Ferk 3 points a year ago

it may as well be a system managed folder at that point.

In a way it is. But user-level system, as opposed to root-level system.

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AkatsukiLevi 2 points a year ago

At that point I'd poke around what's in there, cuz there's absolutely a mess in there

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wolf 5 points a year ago

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.

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Sonotsugipaa 14 points a year ago

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].

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just_another_person 3 points a year ago

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.

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AkatsukiLevi 2 points a year ago

Me, packaging company software to Alpine Packages so that I can just apk add stuff

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wolf 2 points a year ago

Thanks! Do you just put the whole .local/bin under source control, do you link your scripts from somewhere else?

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