5

Problem: During Android development, in order to add ADB path to environment variable; I did following things:

gedit /etc/environment - Added my desired path in the file such as :/media/Software/00.AndroidLinux/ADT/sdk/platform-tools

What I noticed is that adding path to the file has no effect to $PATH until I reboot my Ubuntu.

My question is: How can I add path to /etc/environment variable, so that I can work with my modified $PATH, and without restarting Ubuntu?

2 Answers 2

9

You can add to your $PATH variable directly like this:

export PATH=$PATH:/the/dir/you/want/to/add

Then, edit /etc/environment.

An alternate method would be to still export as I showed above, but then to add the entry to your ~/.bashrc file (if using BASH shell).

echo "export PATH=$PATH:/the/dir/you/want/to/add" >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc

EDIT: Exporting your $PATH in your ~/.bashrc file rather than /etc/environment keeps you from needing to elevate permissions to edit a "global" (system) config file and also keeps other users (if you have any on your system) from having that path auto-added on account creation.

8

Strictly speaking you can't since that file is only read on login, by pam_env. You can however source it in your current shell to read in the values.

$ . /etc/environment

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