This is going to be a much harder problem than you anticipate. As an example, my .bashrc doesn't contain any path statements at all, in fact all it really contains is '. $HOME/.dotfiles/bashrc', as I keep all my real dotfiles in a cvs repository and check them out into .dotfiles on each machine I work on.

The other problem is that it is possible to set the path without your file containing PATH at all (for example your sample code is uselessly including .tcshrc and .cshrc, where the path statements are in lower case).

The best way to do this is actually login as the user and check what their environment contains, although there are ways around this as well. (how would your code deal with: eval 'echo RATH="RATH:." | sed s/R/P/g'?) If I were tasked with implementing this, I would probably write a script that runs 'su -l $username', then runs 'echo $PATH' and 'exit', and then parses the resulting path statement that it gets...

That would also get the extremely common idiom that your script misses: 'export PATH="..."'.

We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!

In reply to Re: Parsing Login Scripts by jasonk
in thread Parsing Login Scripts For Variable Assignment by Limbic~Region

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