Wanting my own plugins to be separated from the default plugins, I used the following approach.
$ mkdir -p /usr/local/nagios/plugins
$ cd /usr/local/nagios/
$ ln -s /usr/lib/nagios/plugins libexec
Now I can save my own file with controlled versions of plugins under /usr/local/nagios/plugins, but they use the distribution (14.04 in my case) utils.pm.
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