Adding a new entry to the PATH variable in ZSH

Question

I'm using zsh and I'm trying to add a new entry (/home/david/pear/bin) to the PATH variable but I don't know how.

The thing that confuses me the most is that there's not a single reference to a PATH variable in my ~/.zshrc file, but doing echo $PATH returns:

/usr/lib/lightdm/lightdm:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games 

So a PATH variable is being set somewhere.

Answer 1

Actually, using ZSH allows you to use special mapping of environment variables. So you can simply do:

# append path+=('/home/david/pear/bin') # or prepend path=('/home/david/pear/bin' $path) # export to sub-processes (make it inherited by child processes) export PATH 

For me that's a very neat feature which can be propagated to other variables. Example:

typeset -T LD_LIBRARY_PATH ld_library_path : 

Answer 2

Here, add this line to .zshrc:

export PATH=/home/david/pear/bin:$PATH 

EDIT: This does work, but ony's answer below is better, as it takes advantage of the structured interface ZSH provides for variables like $PATH. This approach is standard for bash, but as far as I know, there is no reason to use it when ZSH provides better alternatives.