Comment by paulddraper

9 hours ago

People quote both too often and too little.

GENERAL RULE

1. Double-quote dollar sign expressions, and nothing else.

  foo

  "$bar"/foo

  baz:"$(cat example.txt)"

  exec cmd "$@"

2. Single-quote words with a literal special character, and nothing else.

  'Die Hard'

  'ke$ha'

---

I should point out that the author's example is NOT fixed by different quoting though.

  # original
  export PATH="$PATH:~/.local/bin/"

  # without unnecessary quotes
  export PATH="$PATH":~/.local/bin/

Because tilde expansion only happens at the beginning of the word.

3 comments

paulddraper

gray_-_wolf 4 hours ago

> I should point out that the author's example is NOT fixed by different quoting though.

Sure, but I would say you almost always want to add to the start of the PATH, not to the end.

GrinningFool 2 hours ago

I used to put it first for convenience, but got increasingly paranoid about something same-named getting slipped into my ~/.local/bin; now it lives at the end.

JdeBP 7 hours ago

The Z shell's, C shell's, and others's syntaxes for setting the PATH environment variable via a shell array variable alias also does the tilde expansion.

    path=( $path ~/bin )

It's worth noting, also, that the path and manpath settings in login.conf(5) expand leading tildes in individual search path items.

* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=login.conf&sektion...

So putting the addition of things like ~/bin to PATH in /etc/login_conf and ~/.login_conf instead of shell scripts is another way to address it.

    :path=~/bin /usr/local/bin /usr/pkg/bin /usr/bin /bin:

It's particularly handy when there are multiple login shells in use.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/BSDs-for-Linux-users/login-conf.html