validate-path

Path Configuration Diagnostics

Read-only diagnostics for your shell PATH and the rc files that build it.

Scripts

• validate-path.sh — checks every directory in the current $PATH; reports existing, missing, and empty (::) entries.
• analyze-path-bash.sh — parses your shell rc files (.zshrc, .bashrc, .bash_profile, .profile, etc.), follows source/. directives, records each PATH= modification with file and line number, and reports duplicate entries.
• analyze-path-bash-2.sh — a more detailed variant that tracks per-entry source attributions and computes two views of the final PATH (array and string).

All three target Bash 4+ and are pure-diagnostics — they never modify your environment or any file on disk.

Usage

Clone or download the repo, then run each script directly from disk. Do not pipe these into a shell from the network — they are not distributed through the installer and ship with no checksum file; running unverified remote code is against this repo's ai_docs/REQUIREMENTS.md §3.

git clone https://github.com/descoped/script-utils.git
cd script-utils/validate-path

# Validate the current PATH
bash validate-path.sh

# Trace how PATH is built from rc files
bash analyze-path-bash.sh
bash analyze-path-bash.sh -v         # verbose

# Alternate analyzer with per-entry source tracking
bash analyze-path-bash-2.sh
bash analyze-path-bash-2.sh -v
bash analyze-path-bash-2.sh -h       # help
bash analyze-path-bash-2.sh ~/.zshrc # limit to specific files

Output

validate-path.sh prints one line per entry:

/usr/local/bin exists
/opt/homebrew/bin does not exist
Empty (::) path exists

analyze-path-bash.sh and analyze-path-bash-2.sh print per-file trace logs with [INFO] / [WARNING] / [VERBOSE] prefixes, then a summary section listing the computed PATH and any duplicates.

Why

1. Security — empty :: entries resolve to the current directory, a classic privilege-escalation vector.
2. Troubleshooting — locate the rc file responsible for command not found or for an unexpected binary winning on $PATH.
3. Cleanup — identify duplicate or redundant entries accumulated across shell startup files.