justpath 0.0.6

Explore PATH environment variable on Windows and Linux.

justpath

Explore PATH environment variable on both Windows and Linux.

Basic usage

What directories are part of PATH? Use echo $PATH | tr ";" "\n" or

justpath show

Sort them alphabetically. Use echo $PATH | tr ";" "\n" | sort or

justpath show --sort

What are the paths with bin? Use echo $PATH | tr ";" "\n" | grep bin or

justpath show --includes bin

Useful cases

More complex cases are easier with justpath than with bash on Linux or batch files in Windows.

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.

$ justpath show --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

Directory does not exist

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

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

$ poetry run justpath show --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

Purge invalid paths

--purge flag will drop invalid paths from listing.

λ justpath show --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 (it's a file, not a directory)

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

Dump PATH as JSON

There should be a clever bash one-liner for this, but in justpath you can do to dump a list of paths from PATH. You may add --purge flag to show only correct paths.

justpath show --json --purge

Create a new content string for PATH

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

λ justpath show --purge --string
C:\tools\Cmder\bin;C:\tools\Cmder\vendor\bin;C:\Windows\system32;C:\Windows

Installation

Stable version

pip install justpath

Development version

git clone https://github.com/epogrebnyak/what-the-path.git
cd what-the-path
pip install -e .

or shorter:

pip install git+https://github.com/epogrebnyak/what-the-path.git

CLI tools

After installation you will get two aliases for the same command line tool:

pathit --help
justpath --help

Motivation

PATH environment variable syntax on Windows vs Linux scares me, so I wrote this utility to be able to explore PATH more easily.

Notes

1. Neither justpath nor any child process cannot modify your shell PATH, just view it.
2. Yes, you can run echo $PATH | tr ";" "\n" | sort instead of justpath show --sort on Linux.
3. Even better tools than justpath may exist:
   • Rapid Environment Editor for Windows is a gem (no affiliation, just a thankful user).
   • 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.