How do I manipulate $PATH elements in shell scripts?

Question

Is there a idiomatic way of removing elements from PATH-like shell variables?

That is I want to take

PATH=/home/joe/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:         


        

Answer 1

• Order of PATH is not distrubed
• Handles corner cases like empty path, space in path gracefully
• Partial match of dir does not give false positives
• Treats path at head and tail of PATH in proper ways. No : garbage and such.

Say you have /foo:/some/path:/some/path/dir1:/some/path/dir2:/bar and you want to replace /some/path Then it correctly replaces "/some/path" but leaves "/some/path/dir1" or "/some/path/dir2", as what you would expect.

function __path_add(){  
    if [ -d "$1" ] ; then  
        local D=":${PATH}:";   
        [ "${D/:$1:/:}" == "$D" ] && PATH="$PATH:$1";  
        PATH="${PATH/#:/}";  
        export PATH="${PATH/%:/}";  
    fi  
}
function __path_remove(){  
    local D=":${PATH}:";  
    [ "${D/:$1:/:}" != "$D" ] && PATH="${D/:$1:/:}";  
    PATH="${PATH/#:/}";  
    export PATH="${PATH/%:/}";  
}  
# Just for the shake of completeness
function __path_replace(){  
    if [ -d "$2" ] ; then  
        local D=":${PATH}:";   
        if [ "${D/:$1:/:}" != "$D" ] ; then
            PATH="${D/:$1:/:$2:}";  
            PATH="${PATH/#:/}";  
            export PATH="${PATH/%:/}";  
        fi
    fi  
}  

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