Lab 1.1 Adding directory paths to your .bashrc file on Ubuntu 18.04 or 20.04

andrearroyo

Hello everyone

Lab 1.1 Exercise 1 states the following:

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Thus, in this course we would have to be constantly reminding you of the full path to many system administration utilities; any enhancement to security is probably not worth the extra typing and figuring out which directories these programs are in. Consequently, we suggest you add the following line to the .bashrc file in your home directory:

PATH=$PATH:/usr/sbin:/sbin

Could anyone tell me if it is necessary to add the line to my .bashrc file or if they found it beneficial to do so?

I would not want to spend time in the CKA exam logging in and out of a machine if it is not necessary.

Many thanks

coop

without commenting on the exam environment, every time you start a new shell, .basrhrc is read, Also, if you simply type bash in your current terminal, the new environment variable is read in. No need to log out

andrearroyo

Thanks for your answer @coop - much appreciated.

I've also been looking further into my question.

To check if /usr/sbin and /sbin are already in the path, you can do:

echo "$PATH"

To return:

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/snap/bin

Both the directories I was looking for were already present in Ubuntu 18.04 and Ubuntu 20.04...

... and to save having to directly edit the .bashrc file you can use the export command to add, for example, /opt/games to your PATH :

export PATH=$PATH:/opt/games