How to permanently set $PATH on Linux/Unix? [closed]

Answer 1

I stumbled across this question yesterday when searching for a way to add a folder containing my own scripts to the PATH - and was surprised to find out that my own ~/.profile file (on Linux Mint 18.1) already contained this:

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

Thus, all I had to do was create the folder ~/bin and put my scripts there.