[Raion]

There's a lot of myths about what inst can and cannot do. I thought a wiki page would be helpful.

https://wiki.irixnet.org/inst

Let me know if you have suggestions for the article!

[jan-jaap]

Regarding the use of 'r' to use another toplevel directory: while inst allows you to place the program somewhere, in reality it usually doesn't work because most applications are hard coded to e.g. look for their libraries in /usr/lib32, the config in /etc and not $some_prefix/etc.

But it is a useful option if you want to unpack a dist to inspect a file without overwriting your system.

[Raion]

Indeed there are limitations, but it does exist.