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the-tcpdump-group / tcpslice

tcpslice concatenates multiple pcap files together, or extracts time slices from one or more pcap files.
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sbin installation required? #8

Closed brunonaibert closed 3 years ago

brunonaibert commented 3 years ago

Does tcpslice need to run as root? I ask because the installation is performed in sbin. However, if tcpslice does not need special permissions I think it is prudent to install it in the bin folder.

guyharris commented 3 years ago

Does tcpslice need to run as root?

No.

I ask because the installation is performed in sbin. However, if tcpslice does not need special permissions I think it is prudent to install it in the bin folder.

tcpdump doesn't need special permissions to read capture files, so it's not clear why it's installed in sbin rather than bin; I think both should default to bin. I guess some people view them as "system administrator tools".

infrastation commented 3 years ago

The question likely comes from the fact that both tcpdump and tcpslice currently install into /sbin by default when you run make install. That's obviously wrong for tcpslice. For tcpdump people may have reasons to think that /sbin is more appropriate.

infrastation commented 3 years ago

The next release of tcpslice will use bin instead of sbin, thank you for pointing that out. Shall we ask some people that package tcpdump if changing to bin would make it better?

JFYI, on Ubuntu 20.04 $PATH for a non-root user is as follows: ~/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games. Either they gave up distinguishing between the two, or being in an admin group initializes the profile for both.

infrastation commented 3 years ago

@guyharris, do you need me to poll a few package maintainers about the right directory for tcpdump or you prefer to sort this your way?

guyharris commented 3 years ago

If you know the package maintainers, go ahead. I may poke the maintainers of an OS that started with a Mach+BSD kernel and BSD-based userland to suggest that they move it to /usr/bin, as well as poking the *BSDs.

infrastation commented 3 years ago

OK, I can try and post any results to the list. Closing this issue.