How to split the contents of `$PATH` into distinct lines?

Question

Suppose echo $PATH yields /first/dir:/second/dir:/third/dir.

Question: How does one echo the contents of $PATH one directory at a time as in:

$ newcommand $PATH
/first/dir
/second/dir
/third/dir

Preferably, I'm trying to figure out how to do this with a for loop that issues one instance of echo per instance of a directory in $PATH.

Answer 1

echo "$PATH" | tr ':' '\n'

Should do the trick. This will simply take the output of echo "$PATH" and replaces any colon with a newline delimiter.

Note that the quotation marks around $PATH prevents the collapsing of multiple successive spaces in the output of $PATH while still outputting the content of the variable.