The harm i see is what i describe under "moreover" - inconsistency with respect to copying. In your linter example, i think the most normal solution would be t

The harm i see is what i describe under "moreover" - inconsistency with respect to copying. In your linter example, i think the most normal solution would be to add /usr/local/<linter-name>/bin to your PATH. Your solution, of a script which just does exec /usr/local/<linter-name>/bin/<linter-name> "$@", also seems fine to me - quite simple, and less likely to cause weird behaviour than a symlink. I'm not sure what point you're making at the end. We agree that a script not working when invoked from anywhere is bad UX, because people expect to be able to do that. I think that scripts not working through a symlink is not bad UX, because people can't expect to be able to do that, because in many cases that doesn't work!