Adding path to environment variable linux

How to correctly add a path to PATH?

I’m wondering where a new path has to be added to the PATH environment variable. I know this can be accomplished by editing .bashrc (for example), but it’s not clear how to do this. This way:

If there are already some paths added, e.g. PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin:$HOME/bin , another can be added by separating with a : e.g. PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.local/bin:$HOME/bin:/home/ec2-user/pear/bin .

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The simple stuff

depending on whether you want to add ~/opt/bin at the end (to be searched after all other directories, in case there is a program by the same name in multiple directories) or at the beginning (to be searched before all other directories).

You can add multiple entries at the same time. PATH=$PATH:~/opt/bin:~/opt/node/bin or variations on the ordering work just fine. Don’t put export at the beginning of the line as it has additional complications (see below under “Notes on shells other than bash”).

If your PATH gets built by many different components, you might end up with duplicate entries. See How to add home directory path to be discovered by Unix which command? and Remove duplicate $PATH entries with awk command to avoid adding duplicates or remove them.

Some distributions automatically put ~/bin in your PATH if it exists, by the way.

Where to put it

Put the line to modify PATH in ~/.profile , or in ~/.bash_profile or if that’s what you have. (If your login shell is zsh and not bash, put it in ~/.zprofile instead.)

The profile file is read by login shells, so it will only take effect the next time you log in. (Some systems configure terminals to read a login shell; in that case you can start a new terminal window, but the setting will take effect only for programs started via a terminal, and how to set PATH for all programs depends on the system.)

Note that ~/.bash_rc is not read by any program, and ~/.bashrc is the configuration file of interactive instances of bash. You should not define environment variables in ~/.bashrc . The right place to define environment variables such as PATH is ~/.profile (or ~/.bash_profile if you don’t care about shells other than bash). See What’s the difference between them and which one should I use?

Don’t put it in /etc/environment or ~/.pam_environment : these are not shell files, you can’t use substitutions like $PATH in there. In these files, you can only override a variable, not add to it.

Potential complications in some system scripts

You don’t need export if the variable is already in the environment: any change of the value of the variable is reflected in the environment.¹ PATH is pretty much always in the environment; all unix systems set it very early on (usually in the very first process, in fact).

At login time, you can rely on PATH being already in the environment, and already containing some system directories. If you’re writing a script that may be executed early while setting up some kind of virtual environment, you may need to ensure that PATH is non-empty and exported: if PATH is still unset, then something like PATH=$PATH:/some/directory would set PATH to :/some/directory , and the empty component at the beginning means the current directory (like .:/some/directory ).

if [ -z "$" ]; then export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin; fi 

Notes on shells other than bash

In bash, ksh and zsh, export is special syntax, and both PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH and export PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH do the right thing even. In other Bourne/POSIX-style shells such as dash (which is /bin/sh on many systems), export is parsed as an ordinary command, which implies two differences:

• ~ is only parsed at the beginning of a word, except in assignments (see How to add home directory path to be discovered by Unix which command? for details);
• $PATH outside double quotes breaks if PATH contains whitespace or \[*? .

So in shells like dash, export PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH sets PATH to the literal string ~/opt/bin/: followed by the value of PATH up to the first space. PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH (a bare assignment) doesn’t require quotes and does the right thing. If you want to use export in a portable script, you need to write export PATH=»$HOME/opt/bin:$PATH» , or PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH; export PATH (or PATH=$HOME/opt/bin:$PATH; export PATH for portability to even the Bourne shell that didn’t accept export var=value and didn’t do tilde expansion).

¹ _{This wasn’t true in Bourne shells (as in the actual Bourne shell, not modern POSIX-style shells), but you’re highly unlikely to encounter such old shells these days.}

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How to set your $PATH variable in Linux

Telling your Linux shell where to look for executable files is easy, and something everyone should be able to do.

Thomas Hendele on Pixabay (CC0). Modified by Opensource.com. CC BY-SA 4.0.

Being able to edit your $PATH is an important skill for any beginning POSIX user, whether you use Linux, BSD, or macOS.

When you type a command into the command prompt in Linux, or in other Linux-like operating systems, all you’re doing is telling it to run a program. Even simple commands, like ls, mkdir, rm, and others are just small programs that usually live inside a directory on your computer called /usr/bin. There are other places on your system that commonly hold executable programs as well; some common ones include /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/sbin, and /usr/sbin. Which programs live where, and why, is beyond the scope of this article, but know that an executable program can live practically anywhere on your computer: it doesn’t have to be limited to one of these directories.

When you type a command into your Linux shell, it doesn’t look in every directory to see if there’s a program by that name. It only looks to the ones you specify. How does it know to look in the directories mentioned above? It’s simple: They are a part of an environment variable, called $PATH, which your shell checks in order to know where to look.

View your PATH

Sometimes, you may wish to install programs into other locations on your computer, but be able to execute them easily without specifying their exact location. You can do this easily by adding a directory to your $PATH. To see what’s in your $PATH right now, type this into a terminal:

You’ll probably see the directories mentioned above, as well as perhaps some others, and they are all separated by colons. Now let’s add another directory to the list.

Set your PATH

Let’s say you wrote a little shell script called hello.sh and have it located in a directory called /place/with/the/file. This script provides some useful function to all of the files in your current directory, that you’d like to be able to execute no matter what directory you’re in.

Simply add /place/with/the/file to the $PATH variable with the following command:

export PATH=$PATH:/place/with/the/file

You should now be able to execute the script anywhere on your system by just typing in its name, without having to include the full path as you type it.

Set your PATH permanently

But what happens if you restart your computer or create a new terminal instance? Your addition to the path is gone! This is by design. The variable $PATH is set by your shell every time it launches, but you can set it so that it always includes your new path with every new shell you open. The exact way to do this depends on which shell you’re running.

Not sure which shell you’re running? If you’re using pretty much any common Linux distribution, and haven’t changed the defaults, chances are you’re running Bash. But you can confirm this with a simple command:

That’s the «echo» command followed by a dollar sign ($) and a zero. $0 represents the zeroth segment of a command (in the command echo $0, the word «echo» therefore maps to $1), or in other words, the thing running your command. Usually this is the Bash shell, although there are others, including Dash, Zsh, Tcsh, Ksh, and Fish.

For Bash, you simply need to add the line from above, export PATH=$PATH:/place/with/the/file, to the appropriate file that will be read when your shell launches. There are a few different places where you could conceivably set the variable name: potentially in a file called ~/.bash_profile, ~/.bashrc, or ~/.profile. The difference between these files is (primarily) when they get read by the shell. If you’re not sure where to put it, ~/.bashrc is a good choice.

For other shells, you’ll want to find the appropriate place to set a configuration at start time; ksh configuration is typically found in ~/.kshrc, zsh uses ~/.zshrc. Check your shell’s documentation to find what file it uses.

This is a simple answer, and there are more quirks and details worth learning. Like most everything in Linux, there is more than one way to do things, and you may find other answers which better meet the needs of your situation or the peculiarities of your Linux distribution. Happy hacking, and good luck, wherever your $PATH may take you.

This article was originally published in June 2017 and has been updated with additional information by the editor.

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Переменная PATH в Linux

Когда вы запускаете программу из терминала или скрипта, то обычно пишете только имя файла программы. Однако, ОС Linux спроектирована так, что исполняемые и связанные с ними файлы программ распределяются по различным специализированным каталогам. Например, библиотеки устанавливаются в /lib или /usr/lib, конфигурационные файлы в /etc, а исполняемые файлы в /sbin/, /usr/bin или /bin.

Таких местоположений несколько. Откуда операционная система знает где искать требуемую программу или её компонент? Всё просто — для этого используется переменная PATH. Эта переменная позволяет существенно сократить длину набираемых команд в терминале или в скрипте, освобождая от необходимости каждый раз указывать полные пути к требуемым файлам. В этой статье мы разберёмся зачем нужна переменная PATH Linux, а также как добавить к её значению имена своих пользовательских каталогов.

Переменная PATH в Linux

Для того, чтобы посмотреть содержимое переменной PATH в Linux, выполните в терминале команду:

На экране появится перечень папок, разделённых двоеточием. Алгоритм поиска пути к требуемой программе при её запуске довольно прост. Сначала ОС ищет исполняемый файл с заданным именем в текущей папке. Если находит, запускает на выполнение, если нет, проверяет каталоги, перечисленные в переменной PATH, в установленном там порядке. Таким образом, добавив свои папки к содержимому этой переменной, вы добавляете новые места размещения исполняемых и связанных с ними файлов.

Для того, чтобы добавить новый путь к переменной PATH, можно воспользоваться командой export. Например, давайте добавим к значению переменной PATH папку/opt/local/bin. Для того, чтобы не перезаписать имеющееся значение переменной PATH новым, нужно именно добавить (дописать) это новое значение к уже имеющемуся, не забыв о разделителе-двоеточии:

Теперь мы можем убедиться, что в переменной PATH содержится также и имя этой, добавленной нами, папки:

Вы уже знаете как в Linux добавить имя требуемой папки в переменную PATH, но есть одна проблема — после перезагрузки компьютера или открытия нового сеанса терминала все изменения пропадут, ваша переменная PATH будет иметь то же значение, что и раньше. Для того, чтобы этого не произошло, нужно закрепить новое текущее значение переменной PATH в конфигурационном системном файле.

В ОС Ubuntu значение переменной PATH содержится в файле /etc/environment, в некоторых других дистрибутивах её также можно найти и в файле /etc/profile. Вы можете открыть файл /etc/environment и вручную дописать туда нужное значение:

Можно поступить и иначе. Содержимое файла .bashrc выполняется при каждом запуске оболочки Bash. Если добавить в конец файла команду export, то для каждой загружаемой оболочки будет автоматически выполняться добавление имени требуемой папки в переменную PATH, но только для текущего пользователя:

Выводы

В этой статье мы рассмотрели вопрос о том, зачем нужна переменная окружения PATH в Linux и как добавлять к её значению новые пути поиска исполняемых и связанных с ними файлов. Как видите, всё делается достаточно просто. Таким образом вы можете добавить столько папок для поиска и хранения исполняемых файлов, сколько вам требуется.

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