If I type 'man something', I want it to find the manpage in the same order as my PATH. You can add something like this to your .bashrc # # Add my MacPorts, my personal utilities and my company utilities to my PATH. export PATH=$PATH:/opt/local/bin:$HOME/bin:/our_company_utils/bin/ # Now set the manpath based on the PATH, after man(1) parses man.conf # - No need to modify man.conf or manually modify MANPATH_MAP # - Works on Linux, FreeBSD & Darwin, unlike /etc/manpaths.d/ # Must unset MANPATH first. MANPATH is set on some systems automatically (Mac), # which causes manpath to ignore the values of PATH like /opt/local/bin (MacPorts). # Also MANPATH may be deprecated. See "SEARCH PATH FOR MANUAL PAGES" in man(1) unset MANPATH # manpath acts differently on Solaris, FreeBSD, MacOSX & GNU. This works everywhere. manpath >/dev/null # Note that MacOSX, FreeBSD & Linux have fancier ways to do some of this. (e.g. 'man --path' or 'man -q'), but this command is more universal and should work everywhere. Show Sample Output

I used to do a lot of path manipulation to set up my development environment (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH, etc), and one part of my environment wasn't always aware of what the rest of the environment needed in the path. Thus resetting the entire PATH variable wasn't an option; modifying it made sense. The original version of the functions used sed, which turned out to be really slow when called many times from my bashrc, and it could take up to 10 seconds to login. Switching to parameter substitution sped things up significantly. The commands here don't clean up the path when they are done (so e.g. the path gets cluttered with colons). But the code is easy to read for a one-liner. The full function looks like this: remove_path() { eval PATHVAL=":\$$1:" PATHVAL=${PATHVAL//:$2:/:} # remove $2 from $PATHVAL PATHVAL=${PATHVAL//::/:} # remove any double colons left over PATHVAL=${PATHVAL#:} # remove colons from the beginning of $PATHVAL PATHVAL=${PATHVAL%:} # remove colons from the end of $PATHVAL export $1="$PATHVAL" } append_path() { remove_path "$1" "$2" eval PATHVAL="\$$1" export $1="${PATHVAL}:$2" } prepend_path() { remove_path "$1" "$2" eval PATHVAL="\$$1" export $1="$2:${PATHVAL}" } I tried using regexes to make this into a cleaner one-liner, but remove_path ended up being cryptic and not working as well: rp() { eval "[[ ::\$$1:: =~ ^:+($2:)?((.*):$2:)?(.*):+$ ]]"; export $1=${BASH_REMATCH[3]}:${BASH_REMATCH[4]}; }; Show Sample Output

This will show you any links that a command follows (unlike 'file -L'), as well as the ultimate binary or script. Put the name of the command at the very end; this will be passed to perl as the first argument. For obvious reasons, this doesn't work with aliases or functions. Show Sample Output

Tested with bash v4.1.5 on ubuntu 10.10 Limitations: as written above, only works for programs with no file extention (i.e 'proggy', but not 'proggy.sh') because \eb maps to readine function backward-word rather then shell-backward-word (which is unbinded by default on ubuntu), and correspondingly for \ef. if you're willing to have Ctrl-f and Ctrl-g taken up too , you can insert the following lines into ~/.inputrc, in which case invoking Ctrl-e will do the right thing both for "proggy" and "proggy.sh". -- cut here -- \C-f:shell-backward-word \C-g:shell-forward-word "\C-e":"\C-f`which \C-g`\e\C-e" -- cut here -- Show Sample Output

Will convert relative paths into absolute paths. Show Sample Output

search argument in PATH accept grep expressions without args, list all binaries found in PATH Show Sample Output

Searches in order of the directories of $PATH. Stops after finding the entry; looks for only that fileName. Works in Bourne, Korn, Bash and Z shells. Show Sample Output

Removes trailing newline; colon becomes record separator and newline becomes field separator, only the first field is ever printed. Replaces empty entries with $PWD. Also prepend relative directories (like ".") with the current directory ($PWD). Can change PWD with env(1) to get tricky in (non-Bourne) scripts. Show Sample Output

This doesn't work in bash, but in zsh you can typeset -T to bind a scalar variable to an array. $PATH and $path behave this way by default.