Hello everyone,

I am trying to clear up some Environment Variables that are set in my PATH that do not exist. I tried to delete them from the PATH but they just keep coming back. The way that I am doing this is by copying the PATH to a text editor deleting the ones that do not belong and then adding the PATH back:

PATH=$PATH:/dir/dir/dir
export PATH

Am I doing something wrong? The paths keep coming back. I looked in the .bashrc file and found nothing. It is just specific to this user. Where else should I look?

Well, the better thing to do is to locate the place where these specific directories are added to the path and remove them from the source. If you are sure they are for one user only, you have to look in all the configuration files under the user's home directory. For example, suppose you want to remove /path/to/some/dir from PATH:
otherwise do the same as root using /etc as starting point for the find command. Also take in mind that in the path definition a script may use some environment variable like $HOME. So, if you want to locate where /home/user/some/path is added, you have to grep for "/some/path" only.

The reason what you were doing wasn't working, spangler, was that environment variables for a shell are loaded from config files each time a new shell is spawned -- the only thing calling "export" does is cause the shell from which you export the variable to copy it to any child processes.

For example, if you're using bash, your PATH is setup in either ~/.bashrc (for all interactive shells) or one of (~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile) (for login shells). Changing an env. variable directly only affects the process from which the change was made.

Thank you for the advice colucix

I tried to use the find /home/user -type f -print0 | xargs -0 grep "/usr/lib/mit/bin and all it did was bring me to a

>

There was nothing displayed. Did I type something wrong? The path /usr/lib/mit/bin does not exist. I will continue to look through the config files in the users home directory

Yes, you missed the closing double quotes. For this reason the shell still waits for input and shows the secondary prompt ">". Moreover, substitute the real username in the starting search point. For example:

colucix,

You were right. The ending " was not there. That worked much better. Now I have lots of files to browse through to see if I can get this fixed. Thank you for all your help. I will keep this post updated when I get through everything.

Well done. See you soon!