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  • -1 this doesn't work. I still see duplicates in my path. Commented Jun 14, 2012 at 7:34
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    @dogbane: It removes duplicates for me. However it has a subtle problem. The output has a : on the end which if set as your $PATH, means the current directory is added the path. This has security implications on a multi-user machine. Commented Jun 14, 2012 at 7:42
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    Note that echo -n outputs -n in Unix-compliant echo implementations. The standard way to output a $string without the trailing newline character is printf %s "$string", hence Gilles' edit. Generally you can't use echo for arbitrary data Commented Sep 5, 2016 at 13:47
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    Problem I ran into, duplicates with and without trailing slashes "/foo/bar:/foo/bar/" will not removed - however, they are equivalent within the PATH variable. Commented Dec 10, 2019 at 19:03
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    @ChristianHerenz, maybe awk can also split on /: and : at the same time, maybe with regular expression/pattern. Not sure ATM but might be a good thing to explore if you want to improve current solution. Commented Dec 12, 2019 at 8:25