Issue

You wish to add to your PATH on your CSIL Account.

Resolution

NOTE

Please be VERY careful when modifying PATH on your account, as you can make your account be unable to login or use any of the commands...

Exerpt from https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/26047/how-to-correctly-add-a-path-to-path:

Exerpt

The simple stuff

PATH=$PATH:~/opt/bin
PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH

depending on whether you want to add ~/opt/bin at the end (to be searched after all other directories, in case there is a program by the same name in multiple directories) or at the beginning (to be searched before all other directories).

You can add multiple entries at the same time. PATH=$PATH:~/opt/bin:~/opt/node/bin or variations on the ordering work just fine.

You don't need export if the variable is already in the environment: any change of the value of the variable is reflected in the environment.¹ PATH is pretty much always in the environment; all unix systems set it very early on (usually in the very first process, in fact).

If your PATH gets built by many different components, you might end up with duplicate entries. See How to add home directory path to be discovered by Unix which command? and Remove duplicate $PATH entries with awk command to avoid adding duplicates or remove them.

Where to put it

Note that ~/.bash_rc is not read by any program, and ~/.bashrc is the configuration file of interactive instances of bash. You should not define environment variables in ~/.bashrc. The right place to define environment variables such as PATH is ~/.profile (or ~/.bash_profile if you don't care about shells other than bash). See What's the difference between them and which one should I use?

Notes on shells other than bash

In bash, ksh and zsh, export is special syntax, and both PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH and export PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH do the right thing even. In other Bourne/POSIX-style shells such as dash (which is /bin/sh on many systems), export is parsed as an ordinary command, which implies two differences:

~ is only parsed at the beginning of a word, except in assignments (see How to add home directory path to be discovered by Unix which command? for details);
$PATH outside double quotes breaks if PATH contains whitespace or \[*?.

So in shells like dash, export PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH sets PATH to the literal string ~/opt/bin/: followed by the value of PATH up to the first space. PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH (a bare assignment) doesn't require quotes and does the right thing. If you want to use export in a portable script, you need to write export PATH="$HOME/opt/bin:$PATH", or PATH=~/opt/bin:$PATH export PATH (or PATH=$HOME/opt/bin:$PATH export PATH for portability to even the Bourne shell that didn't accept export var=value and didn't do tilde expansion).

Here is the default path on the CSIL/Linux machines minus the reference to your ~/bin location.

If all else fails...

export PATH=/usr/libexec/python3-sphinx:/usr/lib64/ccache:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/sbin

This should, at the very least, give you back most of your path functionality, especially if you need to be able to edit your environment file and can't because your PATH for the executables were accidentally corrupted.

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