I grabbed binutils from the gnu.org website, built it and installed it. I thought it was the latest version. However, the version that was installed was newer. I am using Cygwin with the bash shell. I delted the 'exe' files form the newly created directories (/usr/local/bin/) thinking that the PATH variable would re-direct the execution back to the main '/bin' path. When I execute the as.exe program I get the message 'bash: /usr/local/bin/as Nno such file or directory'. My quesion is how does bash know where the as.exe file used to be?

I don't know exactly how it works, but

turns it off.

Hey...that worked....Thanks.

Oh. 'hash -r' works better. Really, set +h disables hashing at all (it means, shell doesn't try to remember where executables in PATH reside) and hash -r merely drops everything remembered, but allows to remember locations after it.

The /usr/local/bin would be the proper place for programs you download and build yourself. In the future, I would recommend not worrying about it and leaving it where the make install puts it.

The "set +h" turns off hashing. You may be able to run "set +h" followed by "set -h". The "set +h" step may dump a "hash cache". Try saying that three times fast!

"set +h; set -h" == "hash -r", I bet.

Good to know.