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noob here. I want to add a folder to PATH only under my account. Tried to search for answers for quite a while. Ending up get methods like creating .profile .bash_profile under my home directory(~), and add a line with new path information in them. Nothing worked so far. I am using X2Go client on a windows desktop to log in terminal of ubuntu server. Not sure if this process does not evaluate '.profile' or '.bash_profile'? The PATH I get is always the ones defined in /etc/environment(which i cannot modify). If that is the case, how can I add PATH of my own somewhere, which will be available to myself only when I log in from X2Go?

Thanks a lot for any input.

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I had to check the Wikipedia page for X2Go to find It provides secure remote sessions via ssh. Therefore, by reading man ssh ( Online ssh man page ) one finds: 

 Additionally, ssh reads ~/.ssh/environment, and adds lines of the format “VARNAME=value” to the environment if the file exists and users are allowed to
 change their environment.  For more information, see the PermitUserEnvironment option in sshd_config(5).

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~/.ssh/environment
         Contains additional definitions for environment variables; see ENVIRONMENT, above.
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  • Your answer makes sense to me. But there is no way I can test it. Because I cannot modify anything beyond my home folders. In my case, the etc/ssh/sshd_config file does not have a line like 'PermitUserEnvironment'. And the default is no. So I have to change this to yes and then I can test if ~/.ssh/environment will be taken in my session. However, thank you very much and I will wait a little bit to find out and if this is true, I will mark your answer as correct!
    – Li Sun
    Dec 5, 2017 at 22:17
  • You will have to add PermitUserEnvironment yes to /etc/ssh/sshd_config on the target, and restart sshd. If you can't do that, put the commands you want in ~/.bashrc, and type source .bashrc first thing.
    – waltinator
    Dec 5, 2017 at 22:23
  • Another thing, that if I log in from a mac terminal using 'ssh'. I have the '~/.profile' parsed with no problem. Why is this the case? If this is due to ssh thing, shouldn't log in from mac terminal show the same symptom?
    – Li Sun
    Dec 5, 2017 at 22:56

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