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Comment by hnlmorg

7 hours ago

That’s because there isn’t a universal PATH variable.

Env vars are not global. They just have that illusion because a fork() by default will pass your running env vars to the child. Thus trickling that value down.

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hnlmorg

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the__alchemist  6 hours ago

Exactly. It's annoying if I'm just trying to launch an application I installed by typing its name, which is IMO what PATH is for.

  • hnlmorg  6 hours ago

    How are you installing it? Normally package managers will symlink it into a system defined $PATH directory so you shouldn’t need to faff with $PATH yourself.

    Not all applications executable match the application name (eg Visual Studio Code is just “code”). So could that have been the issue?

    • the__alchemist  6 hours ago

      Depends on the software. Generally, whatever the official installation instructions are.

      > So could that have been the issue?

      No. Adding things to the path is a reasonably common operation on all OSes and CLI-based software. Sometimes the installer will handle it for you; sometimes it won't. (This may be out of date, but I believe the Rust install script is an example of one that sets it up; Go is one that doesn't, and its official instructions CAO 6 months ago were to use Export, which doesn't work once you reboot)

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