Cleaning Up Old PATH Entries
Published on
Written by Robert Koch
3 min read
TLDR: Look inside/etc/paths.dfor path entries that haven't been cleaned up.
A quick note about something I wish I had known about a long time ago. I
recently had the a fun little error when compiling some code...
Your PATH contains spaces, TABs, and/or newline (\n) characters.
Very annoying! This is probably going to lead me down a rabbit hole somewhere later but at the time I just wanted to get the project I was working on running. So I investigated what value(s) in my path were causing the error, I ran this useful command to split the path based on colons to easily parse it.
echo $PATH | tr ':' '\n'
This gave me the contents of my path variable in a more human readable format. After staring at it for a few minutes I saw the culprit...
/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public
VMWare I got you! Slight problem, I uninstalled VMware a while back. So the most
likely reason it's sill in my path is during the uninstall the path doesn't get
pruned, buggar! Okay so now I have to find where this entry is added to my path.
I'm quite farmiliar with my
.zshrc file so I knew it wasn't in there, which
really did confuse me for a while. I spent a good hour looking through my path
entries and couldn't find anything. I even tried a general search in my $HOME
for PATH= - no luck.After some time scouring Stack Overflow, Vmware documentation, and the Apple
forums I found a clue. Looking into some documentation and consulting ChatGPT, I
found that there is a default set of initialization files located in
/etc.
Having a look in there I found /etc/zprofile and inside it this peculiar
code...if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; theneval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`fi
Now I've never heard of
path_helper before, so I did a quick man lookup which
lead me to its description.The path_helper utility reads the contents of the files in the directories /etc/paths.d and /etc/manpaths.d and appends their contents to the PATH and MANPATH environment variables respectively.
Okay now we're getting somewhere, doing a quick
ls in /etc/paths.d gave me
the answers that I was looking for.rw-r--r-- 224 root 2 Apr 02:46 10-cryptex.rw-r--r-- 23 root 13 Sep 2022 100-rvictl.r--r--r-- 47 root 30 Jan 2022 com.vmware.fusion.public.rw-r--r-- 20 root 5 Jul 2022 TeX.rw-r--r-- 43 root 10 Oct 2021 Wireshark
Lets take a look inside that
com.vmware.fusion.public file.../Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public
That's what we're looking for! So now all that's left to do is delete the file.
There you have it, a (somewhat) hidden utility to append directories to the
PATH. Next time you're struggling to find a PATH entry have a look inside
/etc/paths.d
👋 I'm Robert, a Software Engineer from Melbourne, Australia. I write about a bunch of different topics including technology, science, business, and maths.