<br><div class="gmail_quote"><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;"><div class="im">
> 4) iterates through $PATH, in order, looking for the first executable foo.<br>
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</div>Yep. The hash table is only an optimization.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br></font></blockquote><div><br> And the big gotcha is that . (current working directory) is not in the path by default as it is in Windows or Dos.<br><br>So if you have an executable in your current directory called cat and you type cat at the command line you'll actually run /bin/cat. If you want to execute the cat in your local path you have to type ./cat.<br>
<br>There are some systems (Ubuntu is one) that have in the ~/.profile this command:<br><br># set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists<br>if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then<br> PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"<br>
fi<br><br></div></div>So you can mkdir ~/bin and put your own personal scripts there and it gets pre-pended to the path so ~/bin/cat would get executed instead of /bin/cat.<br clear="all"><br>-- <br>Matthew Nuzum<br>newz2000 on freenode, skype, linkedin, <a href="http://identi.ca">identi.ca</a> and twitter<br>