Home / ubuntu / Questions / 1169388
Accepted
nobody
Asked: 2019-08-30 07:14:28 +0800 CST

Expand $PATH problem $HOME/bin is set twice

  • 772

I'm using in xubuntu bionic as shell bash.

I'll try to expand my $PATH for my user over $HOME/.profile.

if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

if [ -d "$HOME/.local/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"
fi

The result is a little bit unexpected.

echo $PATH
/home/alex/.local/bin:/home/alex/bin:/home/alex/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games

$HOME/bin is set twice. How can I avoid it?

In $HOME/.bashrc is nothing declared.

command-line bash

2 Answers

  1. Ubuntu is already configured to automatically add $HOME/bin to the path.

    You mentioned you're distribution was Server converted to Desktop and I'm not sure how that effects things but you can check:

    $ cat ~/.profile

# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
# the files are located in the bash-doc package.

# the default umask is set in /etc/profile; for setting the umask
# for ssh logins, install and configure the libpam-umask package.
#umask 022

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # include .bashrc if it exists
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
    . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin directories
PATH="$HOME/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"

    It sounds like this is being executed and what you are manually doing is doubling up on the last line in the file.

    Using grep to find all references

    You can use grep to find all the files where $HOME/bin is referenced:

    grep -rnw --exclude-dir={proc,root,run,sys,/tmp,tmpfs,var} '/' -e "$HOME/bin"
    • 3
  2. Best Answer

    I use Stephen Collyer's "Bash Path Functions" (see his article Stephen Collyer's article in Linux Journal). It permits me to use the "colon separated list" as a datatype in shell programming. For example, I can produce a list of all the directories in the current directory by:

    dirs="";for i in * ; do if [ -d $i ] ; then addpath -p dirs $i; fi; done

    Then, listpath -p dirs produces a list.

    Using uniqpath and listpath (from bash_path_funcs), one could simply:

    walt@bat:~(0)$ PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
+walt@bat:~(0)$ listpath
/home/walt/bin
/home/walt/bin
/usr/local/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/bin
/sbin
/bin
/usr/games
/usr/local/games
/snap/bin
/home/walt/rpi/tools/arm-bcm2708/gcc-linaro-arm-linux-gnueabihf-raspbian-x64/bin

+walt@bat:~(0)$ uniqpath -p PATH
+walt@bat:~(0)$ listpath
/home/walt/bin
/usr/local/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/bin
/sbin
/bin
/usr/gameswalt@bat:~(0)$ PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH
    • 1