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submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by wolf@lemmy.zip to c/linux@lemmy.ml

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@lemmy.world 52 points 1 day 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

[-] Max_P@lemmy.max-p.me 30 points 1 day 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.

[-] AkatsukiLevi@lemmy.world 8 points 1 day 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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this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2025
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