Question

I have a shell account on a Linux server (running Ubuntu 8.04) with user level permissions (but no root priveleges). The system has Git 1.5.x installed. I wish to run a more current version of git. I can compile from source and install in my home directory but would like the git commands to invoke my local, more current install, rather than the older system wide installation of Git.

How do I go about doing this?

Answer 1

Add the directory containing your git binary to the front of your $PATH. For example, if you installed to ~/bin, add $HOME/bin to the front of your path. You can do that in your shell config file; for bash, add this to .bashrc:

export PATH="${HOME}/bin:$PATH"