• @adrianmalacoda@lemmy.ml
    6•3 years ago

    As others have said it’s so the user can place their own executables on the PATH. Ubuntu supports this too, if you look in ~/.profile you will find this snippet

    # set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

    I believe the current convention is to use ~/.local/bin for this purpose, and ~/bin is an older convention.

    • Ephera
      10•3 years ago

      That folder is on the $PATH, so you can place an executable/script into there (or symlink to an executable), and then you can directly run that executable from your shell, with just the file name as the command name (not anymore the whole path).