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The context for this is that I want to read the user's path from xmonad, where the path is modified by whatever's in their .bashrc if applicable.

Here's what I find weird: if I have xmonad execute bash -cl "env && echo $PATH" it returns an env which includes one $PATH which does not match that returned by echo. (I want the former.)

What gives?

And is there a way to fix this, other than parsing the env output?

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The shell is substituting the value of $PATH first, because of the double quotes. I'm not sure what the first set of double quotes is doing, but try one of

'bash -cl "env && echo $PATH"'
"bash -cl 'env && echo $PATH'"

Now, are you trying to extract just the path from the env output? If so, echo is not the tool. You'd want env | grep ^PATH=

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I've edited the original post, my formatting was unclear: the outside quotes were just to set off the command being run. I'm trying to get the $PATH (as possibly modified by ~/.bash_profile and such), I'm just doing both env and echo to compare the outputs as a troubleshooting measure. env works, but I'm interested to know why echo echo doesn't. – Ben Kraft Aug 20 '11 at 16:45
The crux of this answer still stands. The echo $PATH part was evaluated by your current shell and its expansion passed to the subshell. Use single quotes or do this instead: echo "$(env && echo $PATH)" – bahamat Aug 20 '11 at 18:23
This was reasonably close to what worked; part of the issue was, I think, how I was spawning the process in xmonad. But it definitely helped, so thanks all! – Ben Kraft Aug 20 '11 at 19:20
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