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

I prefer using ruby to the likes of awk/sed/foo these days, so here's my approach to deal with dupes,

# add it to the path
PATH=~/bin/:$PATH:~/bin
export PATH=$(ruby -e 'puts ENV["PATH"].split(/:/).uniq.join(":")')

create a function for reuse,

mungepath() {
   export PATH=$(ruby -e 'puts ENV["PATH"].split(/:/).uniq.join(":")')
}

Hash, arrays and strings in a ruby one liner :)