Is there a way to set the PATH that will be checked in a way that is specific to individual files?

The problem I have is that I have unfortunately mixed in a few datafiles with the same names in different directories. I have some binaries (not all the source) and when I run those files it might look in the wrong directory and pull in the wrong dataset.

What I would like is to be able to have all of the files in one directory look in one set of directories for the datafiles, and all the files in another directory look in a different set of directories.

Any suggestions? I'm guessing there is a simple command to do that, but cannot find what that command is.

...I'm not entirely clear on what you want (but my brain's frazzled from writing project descriptions for tax returns all day).

If you want a method to discriminate "/usr/bin/bin1" and "/usr/local/bin/bin1" try adding an alias to your ~/.bashrc file:
Then afterwards, just to refresh your environment.

Thanks, I didn't know about alias before.

I checked it out and it doesn't appear that will do exactly what I need, unfortunately, because I'd have to issue the source command by hand before running each file. My search lead me to conclude that I probably can only achieve what I need using chroot, which is a lot of work, at least for someone who's never done it before.

I'll probably just move some of the directories into a virtual machine.

Thanks for your help.