How to track which file adds a path in PATH?

Question

Something adds an undesired path to my PATH environment variable.

How can I find the culprit?

I've already looked at:

• ~/.bashrc
• ~/.bash_profile
• /etc/bashrc
• /etc/profile
• /etc/environment

Answer 1

This maybe an overkill, and you should (of course) attempt to find it by tracing the order of running scripts, but there are times when that tree becomes way to difficult to parse. So it is possible to simply grep for it:

grep --regexp='PATH=.*/path/that/you/try/to/find' --binary-files=without-match -r /

Please note, that this is a very long process, and your harddrive will be going wild throughout (you are basically reading every text file that you have).

Answer 2

Try:

grep -rF --binary-files=without-match ':/the/undesired/path' / 2> /dev/null

If /the/undesired/path is $UNKNOWN_VARIABLE_NAME_FOR_THE_UNDESIRED_PATH or , this will obviously not work.

Note that /home/user/undesired/path will often be assigned as $HOME/undesired/path.

Run the same without : to also get variable assignments:

grep -rF --binary-files=without-match '/the/undesired/path' / 2> /dev/null

If that doesn't work, find all PATH assignments and filter manually:

grep -rwF --binary-files=without-match 'PATH=' / 2> /dev/null

Answer 3

Separate file finding and searching with find and xargs, see man pages for each.

sudo find / -type f -print0 | \
   xargs -0 --no-run-if-empty \
       grep -l 'PATH'

to list all filenames that mention PATH. Append

| xargs less

to look at the files.

One can't search for /some/deep/path/bin, because it could be expressed as $SDP/bin, for all we know.