Ian Pratt <m+Ian....@cl.cam.ac.uk> wrote:

As I understand the way that sbin vs bin is supposed to work, sbin is for commands that can only ever be executed by root. And make no sense to be invoked by a normal user. The idea being that administrative commands can be moved out of bin to avoid cluttering users' paths. However, if commands that users might want to access are in sbin, then users tend to put sbin in their path so they can see them, thus negating much of the benifit of the bin/sbin split.

So in short, if xm has a mode of invocation that makes sense for non-root users, it should be in bin so both root and non-root users see it without having to fiddle their paths.