How To Add Something To My Path

$PATH is ane of the silent manipulators in the background of your Linux estimator. It quietly affects your user experience, but there'south nothing shady near it. Nosotros'll explain what it does, and how you can adapt it.

What Is $PATH on Linux, and How Does It Work?

When you blazon a command in a terminal window and press Enter, you kick off quite a lot of activity before your control is even executed.

Bash is the default trounce on virtually Linux distributions. It interprets the line of text you entered and identifies the command names intermingled with the parameters, pipes, redirections, and whatever else is at that place. Information technology then locates the executable binaries for those commands and launches them with the parameters you supplied.

The first step the shell takes to locate the executable is identifying whether a binary is even involved. If the control you use is inside the trounce itself (a "beat out builtin") no further search is required.

Vanquish builtins are the easiest to find considering they're integral to the beat out. Information technology's like having them in a toolbelt—they're e'er with you.

If yous demand one of your other tools, though, yous have to get rummage in the workshop to find information technology. Is it on your workbench or a wall hanger? That's what the $PATH environment variable does. It holds a listing of places the vanquish searches and the gild in which they'll be searched.

If you lot want to see whether a command is a trounce builtin, an allonym, a office, or a standalone binary mv /work/unfile, yous can employ the type command every bit shown below:

type clear

type cd

This tells us that clear is a binary file, and the starting time one found in the path is located at /usr/bin. You might have more than one version of articulate installed on your computer, just this is the one the vanquish volition try to utilize.

Unsurprisingly, cd is a trounce builtin.

Listing Your $PATH

It's piece of cake to see what'southward in your path. Simply type the following to utilize the echo command and print the value held in the $PATH variable:

echo $PATH

The output is a list of colon (:) delimited file arrangement locations. The beat out searches from left to right through the path, checking each file system location for a matching executable to perform your command.

We can pick our style through the listing to run into the file system locations that will be searched, and the gild in which they volition be searched:

/usr/local/sbin
/usr/local/bin
/usr/sbin
/usr/bin
/sbin
/bin
/usr/games
/usr/local/games
/snap/bin

Something that might not exist immediately obvious is the search doesn't commencement in the current working directory. Rather, it works its way through the listed directories, and only the listed directories.

If the current working directory isn't in your path, it won't be searched. Also, if you have commands stored in directories that aren't in the path, the crush won't find them.

To demonstrate this, we created a small-scale programme called rf. When executed,rf prints the name of the directory from which it was launched in the terminal window. It'southward located in /usr/local/bin. Nosotros also have a newer version in the /dave/work directory.

Nosotros type the followingwhich command to prove us which version of our program the beat will observe and use:

which rf

The vanquish reports the version it found is the ane in the directory that's in the path.

We type the post-obit to fire it up:

rf

Version ane.0 of rf runs and confirms our expectations were right. The version establish and executed is located in /usr/local/bin.

To run any other version of rf on this computer, we'll take to use the path to the executable on the command line, as shown below:

./work/rf

Now that we've told the vanquish where to find the version of rf we want to run, it uses version ane.ane. If we adopt this version, we can copy it into the /usr/local/bin directory and overwrite the old one.

Let'due south say we're developing a new version of rf. We'll need to run it often as we develop and test it, simply we don't want to re-create an unreleased development build into the live environment.

Or, mayhap nosotros've downloaded a new version of rf and want to practice some verification testing on information technology before we go far publicly bachelor.

If we add our work directory to the path, we make the vanquish find our version. And this change will only affect u.s.—others volition nevertheless utilise the version of rf in /usr/local/bin .

Calculation a Directory to Your $PATH

You tin use the consign control to add a directory to the $PATH. The directory is then included in the list of file system locations the crush searches. When the shell finds a matching executable, it stops searching, so you want to make sure it searches your directory first, before/usr/local/bin.

This is easy to do. For our case, we blazon the following to add our directory to the start of the path and so it'southward the beginning location searched:

export PATH=/home/dave/piece of work:$PATH

This command sets $PATH to exist equal to the directory nosotros're adding, /home/dave/work, and and then the unabridged current path.

The commencement PATH has no dollar sign ($). We set the value for PATH. The final $PATH has a dollar sign because we're referencing the contents stored in the PATH variable. Also, note the colon (:) between the new directory and the $PATH variable proper noun.

Let's see what the path looks like at present:

echo $PATH

Our /home/dave/work directory is added to the start of the path. The colon we provided separates it the rest of the path.

We type the following to verify our version of rf is the first 1 establish:

which rf

The proof in the pudding is running rf, as shown below:

rf

The beat finds Version 1.1 and executes it from/domicile/dave/work.

To add our directory to the end of the path, nosotros only motion it to the end of the command, like so:

export PATH=$PATH:/home/dave/work

Making the Changes Permanent

As Beth Brooke-Marciniak said, "Success is fine, only success is fleeting." The moment you close the last window, any changes y'all've made to the $PATH are gone. To make them permanent, you have to put your consign control in a configuration file.

When you put the export control in your .bashrc file, information technology sets the path each fourth dimension you open up a terminal window. DissimilarSSH sessions, for which yous have to log in, these are called "interactive" sessions.

In the past, you would put the consign command in your .profile file to set the path for log in terminal sessions.

However, we found that if we put the export command in either the .bashrc or.contour files, information technology correctly prepare the path for both interactive and log in last sessions. Your experience might be unlike. To handle all eventualities, we'll testify you how to do information technology in both files.

Use the following command in your /dwelling house directory to edit the .bashrc file:

gedit .bashrc

The gedit editor opens with the .bashrc file loaded.

The gedit editor with the ".bashrc" file loaded.

Coil to the lesser of the file, so add the following export command we used earlier:

export PATH=/dwelling house/dave/work:$PATH

Relieve the file. Side by side, either shut and reopen the terminal window or use the dot command to read the .bashrc file, as follows:

. .bashrc

Then, type the post-obit echo control to check the path:

echo $PATH

This adds the /home/dave/piece of work directory to the start of the path.

The process to add the control to the .profile file is the same. Type the following control:

gedit .profile

The gedit editor launches with the .profile file loaded.

The gedit editor with the ".profile" file loaded.

Add the export command to the lesser of the file, and then save it. Closing and opening a new terminal window is insufficient to strength the .profile file to be reread. For the new settings to take effect, you lot must log out and back in or use the dot command every bit shown below:

. .profile

RELATED: How to Edit Text Files Graphically on Linux With gedit

Setting the Path for Everyone

To set the path for everyone who uses the system, you can edit the /etc/contour file.

You lot'll need to use sudo, as follows:

sudo gedit /etc/profile

When the gedit editor launches, add the export command to the bottom of the file.

The gedit editor with the "/etc/profile" file loaded.

Save and close the file. The changes will take effect for others the next time they log in.

A Note on Security

Make sure you don't accidentally add a leading colon ":" to the path, as shown below.

If you lot do, this volition search the current directory first, which introduces a security chance. Say you downloaded an archive file and unzipped it into a directory. Y'all look at the files and encounter some other zipped file. You telephone call unzip once again to extract that annal.

If the kickoff archive contained an executable file called unzip that was a malicious executable, you'd accidentally burn up that 1 instead of the real unzip executable. This would happen because the beat would wait in the electric current directory first.

So, e'er be careful when you lot type your consign commands. Use echo $PATH to review them and brand sure they are the way you lot desire them to exist.