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mathfailureyesterday at 2:59 PM0 repliesview on HN

Not really, since if one usually does that - they probably understand the possible consequences and don't shadow whatever they like, but do it carefully.

On MacOS I shadow that way just curl and git binaries to the versions installed from homebrew and nothing has broken (yet). I know that tar on MacOS is also a weirdo that I'd rather shadow with the homebrew's gtar, but their args are different and I of course understand that there's a high probability of something in system to be bound to mac's version of tar, so here I better remember to use 'sane' tar as gtar or use an alias (instead of shadowing the binary) for tar to use gtar (because aliases are for users, not for system scripts/processes).

And on my home desktop's Debian - I don't even use shadowing of binaries at all (never needed it).

Also, I just realized: I change PATH env via my shell's rc script (~/.zshrc), so I probably could worry even less about shadowing system binaries (like tar on MacOS) possibly breaking things.