justpath 0.0.12

Explore PATH environment variable on Windows and Linux.

justpath

Just a simple utility to explore and generate PATH environment variable on both Windows and Linux.

Note that neither justpath nor any child process cannot modify your shell PATH, just view it. With justpath you can get a modified version of PATH (e.g. by excluding non-existent paths), and later you can use the generated string in your shell startup start.

Try quickly

Install:

pip install justpath

Try the following:

justpath
justpath --invalid
justpath --duplicates
justpath --correct
justpath --correct --string

Basic usage

What is the raw content of PATH string?

justpath --raw

List directories in PATH line by line.

justpath

Same as above, but no line numbers, no comments, no color, just bare text.

justpath --bare --no-color

Show directories from PATH in alphabetic order[^1]:

justpath --sort

[^1]: Sorting helps to view and analyze PATH. Do not put a sorted PATH back on your system as you will loose useful information about path resolution order.

What are the paths that contain bin string?

justpath --includes bin

Are there any direcotries in PATH that do not exist?

justpath --invalid

Are there any duplicate directories in PATH?

justpath --duplicates

What is the PATH without invalid paths and duplicates?

justpath --purge-invalid --purge-duplicates

More concise:

justpath --correct

A clean PATH string in OS-native format:

justpath --correct --string

Useful cases

1. Filter directory names

justpath allows to filter paths that must or must not include a certain string. Filtering is case insensitive, --includes windows and --includes Windows will produce the same result.

λ justpath --sort --includes windows --excludes system32
39 C:\Users\Евгений\AppData\Local\Microsoft\WindowsApps
24 C:\WINDOWS
14 C:\Windows
46 C:\tools\Cmder\vendor\git-for-windows\cmd
47 C:\tools\Cmder\vendor\git-for-windows\mingw64\bin
12 C:\tools\Cmder\vendor\git-for-windows\usr\bin

2. Directory does not exist or not a directory

justpath will indicate if path does not exist or path is not a directory.

Below is an example from Github Codespaces, for some reason /usr/local/sdkman/candidates/ant/current/bin does not exist, but included in PATH.

λ justpath --sort --includes sdkman
19 /usr/local/sdkman/bin
23 /usr/local/sdkman/candidates/ant/current/bin (directory does not exist)
21 /usr/local/sdkman/candidates/gradle/current/bin
20 /usr/local/sdkman/candidates/java/current/bin
22 /usr/local/sdkman/candidates/maven/current/bin

Added file touch d:\quarto\this_is_a_file for example below.

λ justpath --includes quarto
33 C:\Program Files\Quarto\bin
41 D:\Quarto\bin
50 x:\quarto\does_not_exist (directory does not exist)
51 d:\quarto\this_is_a_file (not a directory)

Use --invalid flag to explore what is parts of PATH do not exist.

λ justpath --includes quarto --invalid
50 x:\quarto\does_not_exist (directory does not exist)
51 d:\quarto\this_is_a_file (not a directory)

3. Purge incorrect paths

--correct flag will drop invalid paths from listing.

λ justpath --includes quarto --correct
33 C:\Program Files\Quarto\bin
41 D:\Quarto\bin

--correct flag is the same as applying both --purge-invalid and --purge-duplicates flag.

4. Dump PATH as JSON

justpath you can dump a list of paths from PATH to JSON. You may add --correct flag to list only correct paths.

justpath --correct --json

5. Create new content string for PATH

With justpath you can create new PATH contents and use it in your shell startup script. As any child process justpath itself cannot modify PATH in your current environment.

You can get a valid string for your PATH in a format native to your operating system using --string ouput flag.

λ justpath --correct --string
C:\tools\Cmder\bin;C:\tools\Cmder\vendor\bin;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows;...

6. Count directories in PATH

λ justpath --count
52 directories in your PATH
1 does not exist
16 duplicates

λ justpath --count --json
{"total": 52, "invalid": 1, "duplicates": 16}

Installation

Stable version

pip install justpath

Development version

git clone https://github.com/epogrebnyak/justpath.git
cd justpath
pip install -e .

or shorter:

pip install git+https://github.com/epogrebnyak/justpath.git

CLI tool

After installation you can try the command line script:

justpath --help

Motivation

I think this quote about PATH is quite right:

I always get the feeling that nobody knows what a PATH is and at this point they are too afraid to ask.

PATH environment variable syntax on Windows and on Linux are different, so I wrote this utility to be able to explore PATH more easily.

Development notes

• See links.md for more about PATH.
• Few good links about CLI apps in general
  • docopt is a great package to develop intuition about command line interfaces.
  • clig - ton of useful suggestions about CLIs.
  • 12 factor CLI app - cited by clig.

Alternatives

Even better tools than justpath may exist.

• On Linux you can run echo $PATH | tr ";" "\n" to view your path line by line and combine it with grep to gain more insights.
• Rapid Environment Editor for Windows is a gem (no affiliation).
• Maybe some smart command-line utility in Rust will emerge for PATH, but not there yet.
• There is pathdebug written in Go that goes a step futher and attempts to trace where your PATH is defined.