How to Display a Neatly Formatted Path

Sep 8, 2013 | posted in: nerdliness

The following function displays your PATH environment variable using color coding and showing each path entry on its own line.

    path() {
      echo $PATH | tr ":" "\n" | \
        awk "{ sub(\"/usr\",   \"$fg_no_bold[green]/usr$reset_color\"); \
               sub(\"/bin\",   \"$fg_no_bold[blue]/bin$reset_color\"); \
               sub(\"/opt\",   \"$fg_no_bold[cyan]/opt$reset_color\"); \
               sub(\"/sbin\",  \"$fg_no_bold[magenta]/sbin$reset_color\"); \
               sub(\"/local\", \"$fg_no_bold[yellow]/local$reset_color\"); \
               sub(\"/.rvm\",  \"$fg_no_bold[red]/.rvm$reset_color\"); \
               print }"
    }

Here’s a sample of the output:

Image of formatted path

I find this function to be particularly useful when dealing with RVM and Homebrew as they are both particular about where in the PATH they occur.