• TheDarkQuark@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Explaining like you are 5:

    If you have worked with programming languages, you might have come across global variables and inbuilt functions/keywords. PATH is a similar global variable for your terminal session.

    Every time you open up a terminal, you load up these “global variables”, and you/programs can access them (or the applications assigned to them).

    So, let’s say you have your application (executable) as /home/werecat/corncob/bin/corn, instead of starting it with ./home/werecat/corncob/bin/corn ..., if you have /home/werecat/corncob/bin in your PATH variable, you can just use it as corn ....

    export PATH="/home/werecat/corncob/bin:$PATH"
    

    just means:

    1. PATH = /home/werecat/corncob/bin + PATH
    2. persist (export) path for the duration of this session (usually until you close the terminal tab)

    If you see somewhere to add it to your /home/werecat/.bashrc file, it means “all commands in .bashrc file are auto-executed every time you start a new terminal session, so if you have it there, you won’t need to manually keep entering the command over and over again”.

    You can list these environment variables by just running:

    env
    

    Also, recommend you have a look at https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-set-an-environment-variable-in-linux/.

    Hope this helps. Good luck on your Linux journey.

    • WereCat@lemmy.worldOP
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      2 months ago

      Thanks. That’s a good ELI5. Fortunately I managed to make sense of it before your reply but the link to environment variables is highly appreciated. As I already replied to someone else, I had no idea PATH was a global/environment variable and just assumed it’s telling me to specify path so I had no idea I need to RTFM as it confused me greatly and on top of that I did another mistake which confused me even more when I finally managed to get it to do correctly which made me think I am doing it wrong.

      I gave up at CMAKE finally as I really need to RTFM more on that as it started to throw many errors at me.