Sometimes in a script you want to make sure that a directory is in the path, and add it in if it's not already there. In this example, $dir contains the new directory you want to add to the path if it's not already present.
There are multiple ways to do this, but this one is a nice clean shell-internal approach. I based it on http://stackoverflow.com/a/1397020.
You can also do it using tr to separate the path into lines and grep -x to look for exact matches, like this:
if ! $(echo "$PATH" | tr ":" "\n" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi
which I got from http://stackoverflow.com/a/5048977.
Or replace the "echo | tr" part with a shell parameter expansion, like
if ! $(echo "${PATH//:/$'\n'}" | grep -qx "$dir") ; then PATH=$PATH:$dir ; fi
which I got from http://www.commandlinefu.com/commands/view/3209/.
There are also other more regex-y ways to do it, but I find the ones listed here easiest to follow.
Note some of this is specific to the bash shell.
List all commands present on system by folder.
PATH contains all command folder separated by ':'. With ${PATH//:/ }, we change ':' in space and create a list of folder for ls command.
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i.e.: Useful if you add ~/bin to your $PATH and you want to override locations of previously ran commands and you don't want to log out and log back in to be able to use them.
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