Setting PATH variable...some confusion

[ubuntini2]

Hi
Simply trying to install YTini
http://yt-project.org/#getyt

After installing am told to edit my PATH variable.

But after some googling it seems there are a few ways to do this

1) From the command line

$ export PATH=/home/jim/02_Scripts/ytini/yt-conda/bin:$PATH

2) by editing /etc/environment

/usr/bin/sudo -H gedit /etc/environment

Confused I tried both methods.
Now when I do

$ echo $PATH

I see

/home/jim/bin:/home/jim/.local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/home/jim/02_Scripts/ytini/yt-conda/bin:/snap/bin


And if I open /etc/environment I see

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/home/jim/02_Scripts/ytini/yt-conda/bin"


Can anyone please explain what is happening and if my $PATH is correctly set?

[TheFu]

I've never touched the /etc/environment when I only want to modify 1 userid's PATH. Don't tough entire system settings for a single userid's needs.

Where a PATH should be updated completely depends on the shell being used. tcsh gets handled differently than Bourne Shell which is different from Bash or zsh or fish.

There is a default PATH, so you need to NOT screw that up. When you modify it, don't replace it. Either append or prepend your update to it. There are a few different ways to make a PATH active. For now, until you understand more, just logout and login again. No need to reboot.

Let's assume you are using bash for the shell. I always want my ~/bin/ in my path - prepended.
Add this to the bottom of my ~/.bashrc file:

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
export PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi
If I'm doing something fancy in a script that might be called more than once per login, I might check whether that path was already added to the PATH environment variable.

Clear enough?

And please use sudoedit instead of sudo gedit to modify system files. Just set the EDITOR environment variable in ~/.bashrc to use gedit, if that is what you prefer. OTOH, gedit doesn't work on Ubuntu Server or any router.
export EDITOR=gedit

[Dennis N]

In (at least) Ubuntu 18.04, if you have an existing folder ~/bin, then the script in ~/.profile already has code to add ~/bin as the first location in $PATH. If ~/.local/bin exists, it will add that to $PATH too.