I have a newly installed version of RedHat 7.3 running on my laptop (installed from FAT32 volume).

My rc.sysinit shows these lines at the beginning of the file.

PATH=/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin
export PATH

However, by the time I have logged into the system and gotten into KDE, my PATH is now:

PATH=/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/local/bin:/home/user/bin

What are all of the possible config files where this is being changed?

More importantly, you can see that /sbin and /usr/sbin get clobbered in the init process, where is the best place to fix this??? (And how/where is this happening?)

Thx...

Yes... You're not loggin in as root, there, so you shouldn't get the sbin paths anyway. Non-root users can often run some sbin things, but normally wouldn't want to anyway.

Switching to root with "su -" should give you the paths back, as well as becoming root, which is, after all, the time when you probably want to run the sbin programs.

In an interactive shell, you'll be running .bash_profile, and in a non-interactive shell, you'll run .bashrc. On RedHat, it makes little difference, but .bashrc will add the ~/bin directory to the path, for user's personal scripts.

They'll also call /etc/bashrc, which sets paths too, but generally by way of the scriptlets in /etc/profile.d/

You'll be glad to know that no paths are getting clobbered, though - the path you've quoted is the right one for a user called "user".

That's the problem though. If I do an su in a Konsole or relogin as root (through KDE) I get the same PATH structure, i.e. no /sbin paths.

Got it... I did an "su -" with the minus sign and it gives me my PATHs back...

I'll have to dig around a little in those scripts and see where the PATH is getting changed (just out of curiousity).

Thx for the help...

No, your paths are *not* being changed. They're being setup perfectly.

Root's path is different from an ordinary user's because only the root user should be running programs within /sbin and /usr/sbin (and /usr/local/sbin).

Most of the programs won't work as anything other than root anyway. Others may work, but will not do anything useful - for instance, mke2fs won't do anything useful because your ordinary users don't have write access to block devices.

All this is a "good" thing.

The reason that "su" doesn't work, whereas "su -" does, is because "su -" sets up the environment for the user (in this case, root) whereas "su" doesn't.