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.

  • Max-P@lemmy.max-p.me
    29·
    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.

    • Akatsuki Levi@lemmy.worldEnglish
      81·
      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