The real answer here.

Right now overlays requires elevated privilèges, but ideally it shouldn’t. Rewriting the Linux kernel to implement per user namespaces like plan9 does would allow unprivileged actions from any user (just like if any user was sitting in a container, overlayed from the base system).

I know we’re not there, and that’s not the direction development is going, but this thread is about dreams, right ? 😉

About the XDG specs, they serve a totally different purpose so they’re out of the discussion IMO. I’m not advocating against env variables. Just $PATH which is a workaround as I see it, but your mileage may vary. As for your “issue” with steam, of course this is the best way to solve it. Because of today’s OS limitation. My point is that with a better designed namespacing implementation, there would be more elegant solutions to solve it (and would get rid of the need to use LD_LIBRARY_PATH too, or literally any *_PATH env variable)

By mounting the binary over, I mean something like a bind mount. But in your case of a wrapper script, it doesn’t apply indeed. Though in this case I would simply name the script steam-launcher and call it a day 🙂

Having multiple executables with the same name and relying on $PATH and absolute paths feels hackish to me, but that’s only a matter of preference at this point.

I’m not saying we should get rid of $PATH right now. My point is that it was created to solve a problem we don’t have anymore (not enough disk capacity), but we still keep it out of habit.

As a reminder, the discussion is about what should be rewritten from scratch in linux. And IMO, we should get rid of $PATH as there are better options.

Today’s software would probably break, but my point is that $PATH is a relic from ancient times that solved a problem we don’t have anymore.

You missed my point. The reason $PATH exists in the first place is because binaries were too large to fit on a single disk, so they were scattered around multiple partitions (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, etc…). Now, all your binaries can easily fit on a single partition (weirdly enough, /usr/bin was chosen as the “best candidate” for it), but we still have all the other locations, symlinked there. It just makes no sense.

As for the override mechanism you mention, there are much better tools nowadays to do that (overlayfs for example).

This is what plan9 does for example. There is no need for $PATH because all binaries are in /bin anyways. And to override a binary, you simply “mount” it over the existing one in place.

$PATH shouldn’t even be a thing, as today disk space is cheap so there is no need to scatter binaries all over the place.

Historically, /usr was created so that you could mount a new disk here and have more binaries installed on your system when the disk with /bin was full.

And there are just so many other stuff like that which doesn’t make sense anymore (/var/tmp comes to mind, /opt, /home which was supposed to be /usr but name was already taken, etc …).

endlessh was pretty cool and a more modern version is even better ! I’ll give it a shot !

On a side note, I found a way to trap HTTP connections too while working on my cyb.farm project. The go implementation is ridiculously simple: tarpit.go. It works by providing an endless stream of custom headers to the client, which it is supposed to ingest before getting to the content itself.

I find the config syntax cleaner.

Crux. Simplest package building system out there, and the core is just out of the way completely, giving you the keys to setup your system just the way you want it.

I didn’t come up with this idea myself, this is straight from OpenBSD disk setup guide (which I personally trust as a good source of info) :

Encrypting External Disks

This section explains how to set up a cryptographic softraid volume for an external USB drive. An outline of the steps is as follows:

• Overwrite the drive’s contents with random data

[…]

# dd if=/dev/urandom of=/dev/rsd3c bs=1m

/usr/share/language/pack/français: Permission refusée

Well as I see it, it will just do a lot of write operations to your disk, which might eventually damage it if you do it a lot (just like any write operation done on a disk). However, this specific command isn’t bad per se, and is even technically a good thing to do for preparing to full disk encryption.

sudo cat is pointless here, better do

</dev/urandom sudo tee /dev/sd*

As a bonus it’ll scramble your terminal 💪

Not with busybox’s rm 🤘

Nevermind I figured it out, you gotta use sudo for it to work properly !

Nevermind I figured what went wrong, I mistyped it initially ! It would have been much easier to copy paste it if it wasn’t a picture…

Fun fact, the command displays a nice cat picture in ASCII :)

Edit: screenshot

I just tried your command and it yields a lot of Permission denied. Is it expected or your command is incomplete ?

I tried but got an error:

:& : Command not found

Is it expected ? Did I type something wrong ? I’m confused…

Just like stabbing yourself if the eye is better with a fork than with a rusty fork.

pf gang rise up !