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.
If I hand write bash scripts, or for those single binary downloads, they’ll go into ~/bin. ~/.local is already used by a ton of packages. This helps a ton when it comes to backups or for just finding where I put stuff.
My ~/.local is
283 GB, it’s where podman/docker/etc put containers, it may as well be a system managed folder at that point. My ~/bin is only120 MBand is a lot simpler to backup/restore/sync to other desktops.In a way it is. But user-level system, as opposed to root-level system.
At that point I’d poke around what’s in there, cuz there’s absolutely a mess in there
It’s really not. Python virtualenv, Steam, libvirt, composer, krita, vulkan, zed, zoxide, systemd, etc. ~/.local is the domain of various installed packages, not my hand crafted scripts.