Re: Where PATH is set

[Wayne Davison <wayned@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Tue, Sep 05, 2006 at 02:31:20PM -0400, Chris Johnson wrote:
> Peter has some lines in the zsh Guide, section 2.5.10, about how zshenv
> is the cleanest place to set environment variables, PATH included.

It's my belief that you need to be careful to not force values in an
*env file that you might want to override.  For instance, if you ever
want to pass a custom PATH to a program, you can get bitten by this:

   PATH=/custom/bin program      #  works fine

   PATH=/custom/bin gdb program
   (gdb) r                       # might NOT work

The above discrepancy is because gdb uses $SHELL to spawn "program".
So, if one of the *env rc files sets PATH unconditionally, you can never
start a sub-shell with a custom PATH (or whatever other environment
variable gets set unconditionally).

I like to set environment variables in .zprofile, and then I also put
some kluge code in .zshenv that ensures that the file didn't get
skipped (which can happen if your login method didn't execute a login
shell, as is the case with some--but not all--X11 setups):

if [[ $SHLVL == 1 && ! -o LOGIN ]]; then
    source ~/.zprofile
fi

..wayne..