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  • Thanks for that info. I was actually just trying to symlink /sbin but ended up with a system that was no longer able to boot on it's own ("command /sbin/init not found"). Is this because of the symlinks inside /sbin? I set up a directory inside /bin called "utils", copied all files from /sbin there (using the -rp flag), deleted /sbin and set up a symlink called sbin, pointing toward /bin/utils. Commented Mar 31, 2014 at 9:37
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    Here's a guess: /sbin/init is itself often a symlink. "init" is the canonical name of the first process; it's the only process actually started by the kernel and cannot be killed, so it is always PID 1 (have a look at, e.g., ps -lp 1). systemd (fedora) and upstart (ubuntu) are new-fangled init systems that symlink their binary from /sbin/init so the kernel can find it. On my fedora here, that link is literally ../lib/systemd/systemd, so if you moved it to /bin/utils the link would be broken (that's not the only symlink in /sbin, either). Commented Mar 31, 2014 at 12:30
  • Thanks. Got it now. For some reason, I was approaching the whole thing from the wrong side. I just generated a list of all symbolic links found on the system. Something that also happened to slightly clear up my earlier confusion as to why people would merge into /usr/bin, rather than the other way around. It's simply way more straight forward, as one doesn't need to care about breaking third party packages. Commented Apr 1, 2014 at 9:14