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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

The s is for "statically linked". Binaries that run early enough in the boot process that /usr/lib might not be there yet.

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Sources I find claim "system binaries":

http://www.linfo.org/sbin.html

Yes.

My system does it like this.

    /bin - static linked basic user commands
    /sbin - static linked system commands (incl. important daemons)
    /usr/bin - dynamic linked user commands
    /usr/sbin - dynamic linked system commands and system daemons
    /usr/local/bin - user commands installed via package
    /usr/local/sbin - system commands installed via package

Is it ? Root and admins have sbin in their path while normal users don’t, so sbin contains more system exe. they may happen to be also static because they are called early in the boot. At least that’s what I thought

For example, /sbin/sh was statically linked on the various flavors of Unix, while /bin/sh was dynamically linked.

So, I suppose it's really both. The statically linked shell would allow you to upgrade the shared libc, for example. Which is both "system" and "static" related.

I have been using Linux/Unix boxes for 19 years. I am ashamed to admit that I never learned this until now. Thanks!

Don't feel too ashamed. I also learned a lot from this article and I've been using Linux/Unix boxes for even longer than you.

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