Add directory to $PATH if it's not already there

Question

Has anybody written a bash function to add a directory to $PATH only if it's not already there?

I typically add to PATH using something like:

export PATH=/usr/local/mysql/bin:$PATH

If I construct my PATH in .bash_profile, then it's not read unless the session I'm in is a login session -- which isn't always true. If I construct my PATH in .bashrc, then it runs with each subshell. So if I launch a Terminal window and then run screen and then run a shell script, I get:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:/usr/local/mysql/bin:....

I'm going to try building a bash function called add_to_path() which only adds the directory if it's not there. But, if anybody has already written (or found) such a thing, I won't spend the time on it.

Answer 1

From my .bashrc:

pathadd() {
    if [ -d "$1" ] && [[ ":$PATH:" != *":$1:"* ]]; then
        PATH="$PATH:$1"
    fi
}

Note that PATH should already be marked as exported, so reexporting is not needed. Also, this adds the new directory to the end of the path; to put at the beginning, use PATH="$1:$PATH" at the obvious place. Finally, this checks whether the directory exists & is a directory before adding it, which you may not care about.

Answer 2

Here's something from my answer to this question combined with the structure of Doug Harris' function. It uses Bash regular expressions:

add_to_path ()
{
    if [[ "$PATH" =~ (^|:)"${1}"(:|$) ]]
    then
        return 0
    fi
    export PATH=$new_dir:$PATH
}

Answer 3

A simple alias like this one below should do the trick:

alias checkInPath="echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n' | grep -x -c "

All it does is split the path on the : character and compare each component against the argument you pass in. grep checks for a complete line match, and prints out the count.

Sample usage:

$ checkInPath "/usr/local"
1
$ checkInPath "/usr/local/sbin"
1
$ checkInPath "/usr/local/sbin2"
0
$ checkInPath "/usr/local/" > /dev/null && echo "Yes" || echo "No"
No
$ checkInPath "/usr/local/bin" > /dev/null && echo "Yes" || echo "No"
Yes
$ checkInPath "/usr/local/sbin" > /dev/null && echo "Yes" || echo "No"
Yes
$ checkInPath "/usr/local/sbin2" > /dev/null && echo "Yes" || echo "No"
No

Replace the echo command with addToPath or some similar alias/function.

Answer 4

Here's what I whipped up:

add_to_path ()
{
    path_list=`echo $PATH | tr ':' ' '`
    new_dir=$1
    for d in $path_list
    do
    	if [ $d == $new_dir ]
    	then
    		return 0
    	fi
    done
    export PATH=$new_dir:$PATH
}

Now in .bashrc I have:

add_to_path /usr/local/mysql/bin

Answer 5

See How to keep from duplicating path variable in csh? on StackOverflow for one set of answers to this question.

Answer 6

Put this in the comments to the selected answer, but comments don't seem to support PRE formatting, so adding the answer here:

@gordon-davisson I'm not a huge fan of unnecessary quoting & concatenation. Assuming you are using a bash version >= 3, you can instead use bash's built in regexs and do:

pathadd() {
    if [ -d "$1" ] && [[ ! $PATH =~ (^|:)$1(:|$) ]]; then
        PATH+=:$1
    fi
}

This does correctly handle cases where there are spaces in the directory or the PATH. There is some question as to whether bash's built in regex engine is slow enough that this might net be less efficient than the string concatenation and interpolation that your version does, but somehow it just feels more aesthetically clean to me.