Question

Possible Duplicate:
Bash: Detect if user's path has a specific directory in it

Given a directory, how can I determine whether it’s on the unix PATH? Looking for a shell script.

Thanks,
Kevin

Answer 1

You can write:

if [[ :$PATH: == *:"$directory_you_want_to_check":* ]] ; then
    # O.K., the directory is on the path
else
    # oops, the directory is not on the path
fi

Note that this won’t follow symbolic links, or anything like that; it’s just a string comparison, checking if colon-$PATH-colon contains colon-directory-colon.