Today I Learned

hashrocket A Hashrocket project

Remove duplicates in zsh $PATH

How to do it?

typeset -aU path

There ya go. All entries in $PATH are now unique

How does it work? Well that's stickier. path and PATH are not the same thing. You can determine that by examining the type of each with t variable expansion.

> echo ${(t)path}
array-unique-special
> echo ${(t)PATH}
scalar-export-special

They are linked variables however, if you change one you change the other but they have different properties. I have to admit at this point that scalar-export-special is something of which I'm ignorant.

The typeset declaration is simpler, it changes the type of path from array-special to array-unique-special. The -a flag is for array and the -U flag is for unique.

See More #command-line TILs