Adding a directory to PATH to run scripts from subdir

Question

I'm using Ubuntu and I'm trying to add a folder to my PATH that contains subfolders including my scripts.

My folder paths are:

/opt/tools/utils/my_script.sh

/opt/tools/steps/my_script.sh

Other scripts do exist, but my focus is on my_script.sh

I have a script, clone from a repo, that does: export PATH=$PATH:/opt/tools, and then it calls utils/my_script.sh. This works fine on my machine, but on my coworker's machine it shows that utils/my_script.sh is not a file or directory. How can this issue be resolved?

Answer 1

That's not how PATH works. If I add a parent directory, I cannot simply call the child:

$ cat ~/foo/bin/bar.sh 
#!/bin/sh 
echo yeh!

Now, if I add ~/foo to my PATH, I can't call the script with bin/bar.sh:

$ PATH="~/foo:$PATH"
$ bin/bar.sh
bash: bin/bar.sh: No such file or directory

I can only do that if I'm already in ~/foo:

$ cd ~/foo/
$ bin/bar.sh
yeh!

The correct way to make the files in a directory available, is to add the directory itself to PATH, not just the directory's parents:

PATH="~/foo/bin:$PATH"

Now, I can call bar.sh from wherever:

$ cd /
$ bar.sh
yeh!

In other words, it isn't working on your machine either. You just must have run utils/my_script.sh from /opt/tools. Try cd / and then utils/my_script.sh and you'll see it fails for you as well.