start-stop-daemon in /sbin?

[mi_unixbird]

So I've been using start-stop-daemon for a while now to control user-level daemons without root, this goes fine. I was also under the impression that it wasn't a gentoo or otherwise OpenRC thing as googling the manpage gives me an ubuntu page so I assumed that it was a general Unix utility. To my surprise, it sits in /sbin, not just /usr/sbin but /sbin. equery also tells me it belongs to the openrc package. So what's the deal? Why does it sit in /sbin when it seems to require no root rights to run and seems to perform well and why is it part of openrc?

[khayyam]

mi_unixbird ...

If you look a little closer then you'll see its just a sym-link to /sbin/rc (or /sbin/openrc ... dependent on what version of openrc you're currently using).

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% man start-stop-daemon | less -p HISTORY

start-stop-daemon first appeared in Debian. This is a complete re-implementation with the process finding code in the OpenRC library (librc, -lrc) so other programs can make use of it.

As to why its in /sbin and not /usr/{,s}bin/ ... its required to bring the system up, and historically we use / rather than /usr as /usr may be a seperate partition.

best ... khay

[mi_unixbird]

So why is it in /sbin instead of /bin if it can seemingly be used just fine to start non root daemons?

[khayyam]

So why is it in /sbin instead of /bin if it can seemingly be used just fine to start non root daemons?

mi_unixbird ... because it's not something that a user is generally doing, and so it doesn't make sense to put it in the standard user PATH. There are other binaries in /sbin ... such as lsmod, modinfo, findfs, etc ... that similarly don't require root privilages to run, but are kept seperate none the less. If you want them in your path then you can add /sbin to PATH, or do something like the following (zsh):

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zstyle ':completion:*:sudo:*' environ PATH="$SUDO_PATH:$PATH"

if [[ $EUID != 0 ]] && (($+commands[sudo])) ; then
    typeset -xT SUDO_PATH sudo_path
    typeset -U sudo_path 
    sudo_path=({,/usr/local,/usr}/sbin(N-/))
fi

... or, similarly without sudo ...

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alias start-stop-daemon="/sbin/start-stop-daemon"

best ... khay