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Better Bash PATH Management with pathprepend

Almost no one actually has their PATH right in their .bashrc. It is usually just blindly appended, which makes simple shell (re)initialization with exec bash impossible. Sometimes people blow out what was already there from the system (which I have done many times).

A better approach is to prepend and append to the existing path and remove any previous duplicate before doing so. This has the added advantage of allowing you — on the fly — to change your path easily during any terminal session without fucking with with your PATH at all.

One caveat, remember that the last argument to pathprepend will appear first in the path.

pathappend() {
  for ARG in "$@"; do
    test -d "${ARG}" || continue
    PATH=${PATH//:${ARG}:/:}
    PATH=${PATH/#${ARG}:/}
    PATH=${PATH/%:${ARG}/}
    export PATH="${PATH:+"${PATH}:"}${ARG}"
  done
}

pathprepend() {
  for ARG in "$@"; do
    test -d "${ARG}" || continue
    PATH=${PATH//:${ARG}:/:}
    PATH=${PATH/#${ARG}:/}
    PATH=${PATH/%:${ARG}/}
    export PATH="${ARG}${PATH:+":${PATH}"}"
  done
}

You can also add this simple one-line bash script to your utilities to allow your path to be pretty printed anywhere on the terminal, including from within a Vi/m session (which aliases cannot do).

#!/bin/bash
echo -e ${PATH//:/\\n}

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