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How to correctly add a path to PATH?

I'm wondering where a new path has to be added to the PATH environment variable. I know this can be accomplished by editing .bashrc (for example), but it's not clear how to do this.

This way:
export PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH


or this?
export PATH=$PATH:~/opt/bin
path environment-variables bash
by

2 Answers

rahul07
Either way works, but they don't do the same thing: the elements of PATHare checked left to right. In your first example, executables in ~/opt/bin will have precedence over those installed, for example, in /usr/bin, which may or may not be what you want.

In particular, from a safety point of view, it is dangerous to add paths to the front, because if someone can gain write access to your ~/opt/bin, they can put, for example, a different ls in there, which you'd then probably use instead of /bin/ls without noticing. Now imagine the same for ssh or your browser or choice... (The same goes triply for putting . in your path.)
sandhya6gczb
Linux determines the executable search path with the $PATH environment variable. To add directory /data/myscripts to the beginning of the $PATH environment variable, use the following:


PATH=/data/myscripts:$PATH

To add that directory to the end of the path, use the following command:


PATH=$PATH:/data/myscripts

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