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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

why would you use absolute path for qmail?

This was years ago - about 15 I think - and I can't actually remember why. I could lie and say it was something that djb wrote in the manual about best practice at the time but I think it was more likely habit.

Not trusting root's path is defensive practice.

What's 'qmail'?

If root's PATH environment variable can be compromised, then you might as well ditch the whole system.

It may not be common practice (I typically rely on $PATH). But it is, as I noted, defensive.

There are numerous ways in which $PATH can change. Shared profiles and other users modifying root's init among them. Intent isn't necessarily malicious. It can still be unexpected.

There was a Steam script that had a nasty habit of running '# rm /*' due to an empty script variable.

I do not trust vendor scripts.

Really fscking annoying: scripts that include inline binary data.

The first google result for qmail:

> qmail is a mail transfer agent (MTA) that runs on Unix. It was written, starting December 1995, by Daniel J. Bernstein as a more secure replacement for the popular Sendmail program; qmail's source code is in the public domain.

Wrong question.

Not "what is the application 'qmail'" (I'm quite aware, thanks). But "what is the token 'qmail'" evaluated to by the shell.

If you prefer: "which qmail".

That's a a good question. The mail client (most boxes uses mailx to implement it these days) is normally just 'mail'. and qmail would normally be in an sbin dir.

Note: the question applies to all executed commands.

Sorry, I misunderstood you. I retract my snark :)

Habit from scripting. Remember that users can modify their own paths, possibly to prioritize ~/bin over everything else (which may have unexpected behavior).

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