Re: PATH editing in a script

[njs3@doc.ic.ac.uk (Niall Smart)]

On Feb 24,  2:11pm, Helmut Jarausch wrote:
} Subject: PATH editing in a script
> Hi,
> does anybody know how to edit the PATH environment variable?
> Something like 'vared' but in a script (like sed)
> 
> Problem:
> 
> Having two versions of (say) TeX I would like to replace the PATH to tex
> in a user PATH environment string.
> 
> Like
> s|/usr/local/lib/TeX|/usr/local/teTeX|
> 
> It's no problem to edit the PATH e.g. by Perl but these changes have to
> persist whence the (Perl/Zsh) script finishes.

As someone has already pointed out, the environment list resides in a
processes address space and you can't easily go poking around in another
processes address space to change it.

One technique I've seen used is:

alias foo="eval `foo.real`"

foo.real:

#!/bin/sh
echo export PATH=$PATH | sed 's,/usr/local/lib/TeX,/usr/local/teTeX,g'

Niall