Remove redundant paths from PATH variable

Question

I have defined the same path in the  PATH variable 6 times    I wasn t logging out to check whether it worked   How can I remove the duplicates   The  PATH variable looks like this   echo  PATH   usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin  usr games  home flacs Programmes USFOS bin  home flacs Programmes USFOS bin  home flacs Programmes USFOS bin  home flacs Programmes USFOS bin  home flacs Programmes USFOS bin  home flacs Programmes USFOS bin   How would I reset it to just   usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin  usr games

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If you re using Bash  you can also do the following if  let s say  you want to remove the directory  home wrong dir  from your PATH variable   PATH  echo  PATH   sed -e  s    home  wrong  dir

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Assuming your shell is Bash  you can set the path with  export PATH  usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin  usr games   but like Levon said in another answer  as soon as you terminate the shell the changes will be gone  You probably want to set up your PATH in    bash profile or    bashrc

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If you just want to remove any duplicate paths  I use this script I wrote a while back since I was having trouble with multiple perl5 bin paths      bin bash     path-cleanup     This must be run as  source path-cleanup  or    path-cleanup    so the current shell gets the changes   pathlist  echo  PATH   sed  s    n g    uniq     echo  Starting PATH   PATH    echo  pathlist   pathlist  unset PATH   echo  After unset  PATH   PATH  for dir in  pathlist do     if test -d  dir   then         if test -z  PATH  then             PATH  dir         else             PATH  PATH  dir         fi     fi done export PATH   echo  After loop  PATH   PATH    And I put it in my    profile at the end  Since I use BASH almost exclusively  I haven t tried it in other shells

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Here is a one line code that cleans up the PATH   It does not disturb the order of the PATH  just removes duplicates   Treats   and empth PATH gracefully   No special characters used  so does not require escape   Uses  bin awk so it works even when PATH is broken    export PATH    echo   PATH    bin awk  BEGIN RS        sub sprintf   c   10      if A  0    else A  0  1  printf   NR  1          0

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How did you add these duplicate paths to your PATH variable  You must have edited one of your   files    tcshrc  or  bashrc  etc depending on your particular system shell   The way to fix it is to edit the file again and remove the duplicate paths    If you didn t edit any files  and you you must have modified the PATH interactively  In that case the changes won t  stick   ie if you open another shell  or log out and log back in  the changes will be gone automatically   Note that there are some system wide config files too  but it s unlikely you modified those  so most likely you ll be changing files in your personal home directory  if you want to make those changes permanent once you settle on a set of paths

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PATH echo  PATH   sed  s    n g    sort -u   sed   a N   ba s  n   g

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You just execute   export PATH  usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin  usr games   that would be for the current session  if you want to change permanently add it to any  bashrc  bash bashrc   etc profile - whatever fits your system and user needs   Note  This is for Linux  We ll make this clear for new coders          Don t try to SET   these

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Linux  Remove redundant paths from  PATH variable   Linux From Scratch has this function in  etc profile    Functions to help us manage paths   Second argument is the name of the   path variable to be modified  default  PATH  pathremove              local IFS             local NEWPATH         local DIR         local PATHVARIABLE   2 -PATH          for DIR in    PATHVARIABLE    do                 if     DIR       1      then                   NEWPATH   NEWPATH   NEWPATH   DIR                 fi         done         export  PATHVARIABLE   NEWPATH      This is intended to be used with these functions for adding to the path  so that you don t do it redundantly   pathprepend              pathremove  1  2         local PATHVARIABLE   2 -PATH          export  PATHVARIABLE   1   PATHVARIABLE      PATHVARIABLE       pathappend              pathremove  1  2         local PATHVARIABLE   2 -PATH          export  PATHVARIABLE     PATHVARIABLE     PATHVARIABLE    1      Simple usage is  to just give pathremove the directory path to remove - but keep in mind that it has to match exactly     pathremove  home username anaconda3 bin   This will remove each instance of that directory from your path   If you want the directory in your path  but without the redundancies  you could just use one of the other functions  e g  - for your specific case     pathprepend  usr local sbin   pathappend  usr local bin   pathappend  usr sbin   pathappend  usr bin   pathappend  sbin   pathappend  bin   pathappend  usr games   But  unless readability is the concern  at this point you re better off just doing     export PATH  usr local sbin  usr local bin  usr sbin  usr bin  sbin  bin  usr games   Would the above work in all shells known to man   I would presume the above to work in sh  dash  and bash at least  I would be surprised to learn it doesn t work in csh  fish   orksh   I doubt it would work in Windows command shell or Powershell   If you have Python  the following sort of command should do what is directly asked  that is  remove redundant paths      PATH    python -c   import os path   os environ  PATH   split      print     join sorted set path   key path index          A one-liner  to sidestep multiline issues      PATH    python -c  import os  path   os environ  PATH   split       print     join sorted set path   key path index         The above removes later redundant paths  To remove earlier redundant paths  use a reversed list s index and reverse it again     PATH    python -c   import os path   os environ  PATH   split        -1  print     join sorted set path   key path index  reverse True

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For an easy copy-paste template I use this Perl snippet   PATH  echo  PATH   perl -pe s  path to be excluded      This way you don t need to escape the slashes for the substitute operator

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Just echo  PATH copy details into a text editor remove unwanted entries PATH    pass new list of entries

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In bash you simply can   var find replace   PATH   PATH     home  wrong  dir       Or in this case  as the replace bit is empty  just   PATH   PATH    home  wrong  dir      I came here first but went else ware as I thought there would be a parameter expansion to do this   Easier than sed    How to replace placeholder character or word in variable with value from another variable in Bash

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There are no standard tools to  edit  the value of  PATH  i e   add folder only when it doesn t already exists  or  remove this folder     To check what the path would be when you login next time  use telnet localhost  or telnet 127 0 0 1   It will then ask for your username and password   This gives you a new login shell  i e  a completely new one that doesn t inherit anything from the current environment    You can check the value of the  PATH there and edit your rc files until it is correct  This is also useful to see whether you could login again at all after making a change to an important file

[linux] Remove redundant paths from $PATH variable

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