# Cleaning Up Old PATH Entries

> Finding out where all those pesky paths entries are being set.

- URL: https://blog.kochie.io/articles/09-cleaning-up-old-paths
- Author: Robert Koch
- Published: 2023-04-23
- Tags: 100DTO, software

---

> TLDR: Look inside `/etc/paths.d` for 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.

```bash
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, bugger! Okay so now I have to find where this entry is added to my path.
I'm quite familiar 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...

```bash
if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
	eval `/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.

```none wrap
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`