[Solved] My $PATH is problematic - How to fix it?

cgmd · Last edited by cgmd on Fri Oct 07, 2005 5:57 pm; edited 1 time in total

Hi all...

I happened to check my command PATH earlier today ans was shocked to find the length of it as well as some duplication.

:

Nil_Spaar · Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 2:37 am Post subject:

Afaik you should change PATH in ~/.bash_profile rather than ~/.bashrc because the first is only read by a login shell and the second only by non-login shell (but usually sourced by .bash_profile so in effect always read). So that statement gets executed once when you login and again when the bash in your kde terminal window is started hence you have it twice in your path.
The usual setup (under Gentoo) is that login shells source /etc/profile (which in turn sources /etc/bash/bashrc) and then source ~./.bash_profile (which sources ~/.bashrc). Non-login shells source the bashrc files but not the profile ones. (This is from memory. Look at "man bash" under INVOCATION for exact details).
Your path is set in /etc/profile which takes that info from /etc/profile.env which is generated by env-update from the files in /etc/env.d/. But (unless you know what you are doing) you shouldn't mess with those files by hand since they are put there by the respective packages and with good reason. Since many packages install executables in non-standard places a rather long PATH is needed. (Mine is /home/christian/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/opt/bin:/usr/i686-pc-linux-gnu/gcc-bin/3.3.6:/opt/blackdown-jdk-1.4.2.02/bin:/opt/blackdown-jdk-1.4.2.02/jre/bin:/usr/qt/3/bin:/usr/kde/3.4/bin:/usr/games/bin atm.)
The only strange things about your PATH as far as I can see are

double /home/cgmd/bin
(see above)
double /usr/kde/3.4/bin
no idea really, look at the kde related files in /etc/env.d
the i386-pc-linux-gnu path
strange, but I think I dimly remember having that one too some time ago, might be a leftover from first installation or a less than perfect gcc-upgrade. Look for the file that contains that stuff and if the things there seem obsolete (e.g. they point to directories that don't exist) then I guess it would be save to just remove it.

cgmd · Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2005 3:20 am Post subject:

Nil_Spaar wrote...

Nil_Spaar · Posted: Wed Oct 05, 2005 3:19 am Post subject:

cgmd · Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 9:40 pm Post subject:

Nil_Spaar wrote...

Nil_Spaar · Posted: Thu Oct 06, 2005 11:31 pm Post subject:

cgmd · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 11:19 am Post subject:

Nil_Spaar...

After a little poking around, this is where I believe the culprit to be:

Nil_Spaar · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 1:04 pm Post subject:

You know it sometimes helps immensely to actually read what I wrote. So let's do that step by step:
"I for example have: /etc/env.d # cat 05gcc [stuff with 686 entries]" <-- that's the good file with the correct entries
"and I guess you have a similar file."
"But there's probably another file with a similar name" <-- your 05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu file seems to match that description
"that has similar entries but with i386 instead of i686." <-- wow and again your 05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu seems to match
"That would be the one to delete." <-- well I guess what I meant by this is, yes you can delete the 05gcc-i686-pc-linux-gnu file since it contains invalid data

cgmd · Posted: Fri Oct 07, 2005 5:56 pm Post subject:

Nil_Spaar wrote: