Function to prepend to environment variables
Environment variables are often used to store a list of paths of where to search for executables, libraries, and so on. Examples are $PATH
, $LD_LIBRARY_PATH
, which will typically look like this:
PATH=/usr/bin;/bin LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib;/lib
This essentially means that whenever the shell has to execute binaries, it will first look into /usr/bin
followed by /bin
.
A very common task that one has to do when building a program from source and installing to a custom path is to add its bin
directory to the PATH
environment variable. Let's say in this case we install myapp to /opt/myapp
, which has binaries in a directory called bin
and libraries in lib
.
How to do it...
A way to do this is to say it as follows: ...
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