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Comment by fit2rule | Hacker News Reader

What is /usr/local for, if its not for locally installed (by the user) sub-components?

Just curious whats wrong with using /usr/local. This is what its for, after all ..

Using /usr/local is just fine. But I feel uneasy when a system directory is owned by just my user. What if there is another user on my system that also wants to perform a brew update?

Using sudo would also be a security advantage since not every program running under your username would be able to modify all binaries in /usr/local.

/usr/local is for machine local packages vs. packages that are meant to be shared across multiple machines. /usr/local is still under the control of the local sysadmin though and not a user.

http://www.pathname.com/fhs/pub/fhs-2.3.html#USRLOCALLOCALHI...

Really brew should always be installing somewhere under ~/ if you are installing packages as a user.

/usr/local makes sense to me if you've installed brew with sudo. But as other comment says, it's weird to me to have files owned by login user in system directory. It's such a rare scenario now I guess of multiple people on same machine, but isn't user home directory place for files owned by login user?

Typically /usr/local relies on group permissions: the accounts that you trust to build and install stuff are added to, eg. 'admin' group, and /usr/local is group writable for admin with the group s-bit set.

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