I have installed node.js at custom location and added the location to the $PATH in .profile file.
$ node --version v0.6.2 $ which node $ echo $PATH /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin:~/Unix/homebrew/bin $ cat ~/.profile export PATH="$PATH:~/Unix/homebrew/bin"
Node.js itself runs well. The problem is it is not listed by which command. So I can’t install npm now. Because npm install cannot find the location of node.js. How can I make the node binary discovered by which?
Answers:
Thank you for visiting the Q&A section on Magenaut. Please note that all the answers may not help you solve the issue immediately. So please treat them as advisements. If you found the post helpful (or not), leave a comment & I’ll get back to you as soon as possible.
Method 1
That line in your .profile should be one of
export PATH="$PATH:$HOME/Unix/homebrew/bin" PATH="$PATH:$HOME/Unix/homebrew/bin" PATH=$PATH:$HOME/Unix/homebrew/bin PATH=$PATH:~/Unix/homebrew/bin
The ~ character is only expanded to your home directory when it’s the first character of a word and it’s unquoted. In what you wrote, the ~ is between double quotes and therefore not expanded. Even if you wrote export "PATH=$PATH:"~/Unix/homebrew/bin, the ~ would not be expanded because it is not at the beginning of a shell word.
There is a special dispensation, which is intended to write values for PATH and similar variables. If ~ is just after the equal sign that marks an assignment, or if ~ is just after a : in the right-hand side of an assignment, then it’s expanded. Only plain assignments have this dispensation, export PATH=… does not count (it’s a call to the export builtin, which happens to have an argument that contains a = character).
Here, you do not need to export PATH because it’s already exported. You don’t need to call export when you change the value of a variable (except in old Bourne shells that you won’t find on OSX or Linux). Also, in an assignment (again, export does not count), you do not need double quotes around the right-hand side, so PATH=$PATH:~/Unix/homebrew/bin is safe even if $PATH contains spaces.
Method 2
This is happening because ~ has not been expanded. Your shell knows how to deal with this, but which does not (nor would most other programs). Instead, do:
export "PATH+=:$HOME/Unix/homebrew/bin"
Alternatively, stop using which, and use the (almost always superior) type -p.
Here is a demonstration of the issue:
$ echo "$PATH" /usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin $ export "PATH+=:~/git/yturl" $ yturl Usage: yturl id [itag ...] $ which yturl $ type -p yturl /home/chris/git/yturl/yturl $ export "PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:$HOME/git/yturl" $ which yturl /home/chris/git/yturl/yturl
Bear in mind that some other programs that look at $PATH may not understand the meaning of ~ either, and take it as part of a relative path. It’s more portable to use $HOME.
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0