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#PATH Env Pollution

enviroments: Alacritty, zsh, tmux, conda

Pollution Cases:

  • Repetitive paths in PATH
  • some paths are overridden, for example, which python results in /usr/bin/python3 rather /.../anaconda3/bin, and the error ModuleNotFoundError: No module named ... could happen.

Reasons: The zsh shell files run in order of:

/etc/zshenv
~/.zshenv
/etc/zprofile
~/.zprofile
/etc/zshrc
~/.zshrc
/etc/zlogin
~/.zlogin

These files change the $PATH.

  • PATH accidentally polluted by all kinds of tools
  • when a tmux session starts, the shell files runs again and results in repetition and overrides.

Solution:

One quick way to find how these files change the PATH is echo $PATH and the start and the end of the files. Identify the locations where the PATH has been incorrectly modified and correct them.

Note that when a Alacritty window is started, not all the shell files run. Depends on login or non-login shell is opened (check alacritty configuration Shell)

For tmux sessions, there is no way(?) to stop it source those shell files because it start a new session. Tmux start a new non-login shell by default, if not, set it manually. This cannot stopping the sourcing of /etc/zshrc, ~/.zshrc and (maybe) others. In that case, set PATH in this files when it is not in tmux enviroments.

if ! [ -n "$TMUX" ]; then
    export PATH = ...
fi

Best Bractice(?):

  • Carefully manually set PATH
  • Try to set PATH in one single file, e.g. move all settings from ~/.zshenv to ~/.zshrc
  • Set PATH like if somepath not in PATH, PATH="somepath:$PATH"

Others:

  • path_helper in /etc/zprofile add paths in /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d to PATH.