Re: [gentoo-user] bash wizardry needed: PATH and MANPATH grow and grow and grow

[Kevin O'Gorman]

On 5/23/06, znx <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

On 21/05/06, Kevin O'Gorman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>  Does anyone know a nice little idiom for de-duping a colon-list like PATH
> or MANPATH?

Yeah this is something that constantly annoyed me, I forget where I
found this (although I moved it to a function), it is not of my
creation.

To ensure no confusion with the below paste, I have additionally
placed this in a text file:
http://kutzooi.co.uk/cleanpath.sh.txt

function cleanpath {
                # Removes duplicates from PATH style variables
        local variable='PATH'
        if [ $# -eq 1 ]
        then
                variable="$1"
        fi
        local var="${1:-${variable}}" oldpath newpath=: entry
        oldpath="${!var}:"
        while [ -n "$oldpath" ]; do
                entry="${oldpath%%:*}"
                oldpath="${oldpath#*:}"
                [ "${entry:0:1}" = / ] && [ -n "${newpath##*:$entry:*}" ] && \
                        [ -d "$entry" ] && newpath="$newpath$entry:"
        done
        newpath="${newpath#:}"
        eval "$var"'="${newpath%:}"'
}

cleanpath                                       # defaults to PATH
cleanpath MANPATH
cleanpath LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Hope this helps.
Mark

--
gentoo-user@gentoo.org mailing list

This _does_ help.  It's mysterious enough that I tested it, and it seems to work
except that it removes "." from any path.  This is not quite what I want.

++ kevin


--
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD