Can't add directory to the PATH

hpladd · 07-25-2006, 04:13 PM

Hey all,

If I do the following:

Quote:

export PATH="$PATH:/usr/lib/qt-3.3/bin"

The entry is only in the PATH for the current session. If I reboot qt-3.3 directory is missing from the PATH's.

Tried editing the /etc/profile.d file directly, but it does not contain the colon separated list of directories that I expected to find there.

I'm using Fedora Core 4.

spirit receiver · 07-25-2006, 04:18 PM

Put that line into ~/.bash_profile. (I hope that's the right file for Red Hat, it might also be ~/.profile)

hpladd · 07-25-2006, 04:46 PM

Spirit,

Aaaaah that's much better.

For the sake of knowledge -- could I have done something the following?

Quote:

export PATH= place the current colon separarted list here:usr/lib/qt-3.3/bin

It was .bash_profile in case you were curious. Linux folks usually are -- that's how we got into this mess

Thanks.

spirit receiver · 07-25-2006, 04:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by hpladd

could I have done something the following?

You could, but it makes sense to have some system wide default content of the PATH variable (coming from /etc/profile for example) and add some custom settings on a per user basis as explained here.

Edit: Although the system wide settings would probably seem appropriate for Qt binaries. There might be some extra file for customized system wide settings, I don't know which file that is in Red Hat. Here it's /etc/profile.local, but then SUSE also uses ~/.profile instead of ~/.bash_profile, maybe someone else can help.

zytsef · 07-25-2006, 04:55 PM

Putting the same thing in ~/.bashrc ought to do the trick for non-login shells, if you need such a thing.

spirit receiver · 07-25-2006, 05:17 PM

zytsef, .profile is the better place for this as you don't want it to be executed each time a subshell is spawned. Have a look at the following, here I added the line "export a=$a:Oops" to ~/.bashrc

Code:

ada@barnabas:~> echo $a
Default
ada@barnabas:~> bash
ada@barnabas:~> echo $a
Default:Oops
ada@barnabas:~> bash
ada@barnabas:~> echo $a
Default:Oops:Oops

This won't happen with .profile, and note that an interactive shell will inherit its environment from a login shell anyway.