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How to assign File/Folder path to a Variable in Terminal

Say I have the following path:

I tried to assign the above given File-Path to a variable FILE_NAME as follows,

The output was:

How to resolve this issue?

• command-line
• environment-variables

2 Answers 2

You have to use quotes if the path contains space characters:

• 1 I tried giving the file name within quotes but the error still remains. –  logamadi Mar 14, 2015 at 20:34
• 1 @logamadi The error isn't an issue setting the variable, it's from how you're calling it. If you want to echo the content of the variable, run echo $FILE_NAME . What you were doing is just trying to execute it. And if it's still telling you it doesn't exist, it doesn't exist. –  Oli ♦ Mar 14, 2015 at 21:17
• 1 @Rmano,@Oli The commands "ls" and "cd" work when we wrap the User-defined variable within quotes like :cd "$FILE_NAME" (or) ls "$FILE_NAME" Credit to george Barbaz –  logamadi Mar 15, 2015 at 5:28

The issue is the embedded blank in the name. The simplest way to resolve this issue is to enclose the full path string with quotes (i.e. FILE_NAME="/home/${USER}/Downloads/My Folder" The reason to use " in your case is because of your use of $USER which requires a substitution, with ' this would not occur.

A secondary question is how are you going to use the variable. In your example... I would assume that you dropped the cd from the command however ... to use the variable ... you should probably also use " around its use

so ... my guess at your use ... cd "$FILE_NAME"

• Error still persists –  logamadi Mar 14, 2015 at 20:42
• 1 see further edit of my msg ... the command line you are using would try to execute "$FILE_NAME" –  george Barbaz Mar 14, 2015 at 20:45

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How to set up your $PATH variable in Bash

An environment variable can come in two sizes--global or local. A global environment variable is one that is set upon initialization of a shell and can be used across all your shells. A local environment variable is one that is set during a shell session and is erased when the shell is closed. To create a local environment variable, just export it in your shell.

You can use this as long as the shell is still open.

As soon as you close the shell, this will no longer be a variable. If you want to create a global variable, you will need to export it in one of your bash configuration files. It is recommended that you place it in the ~/.profile file as described in this tutorial .

To see all of the environment variables in your current environment (both local and global), you can type the following command.

Shell Variables

Oftentimes, users will get confused when talking about environment variables and shell variables. Regardless of whether the environment variable is local or global, all the scripts running in that shell session will have access to the variable. With a shell variable, other scripts will not have access to it. The following is how we declare a shell variable.

This variable will not be available to any script until we export it and make it an environment variable.

PATH variable

The most important global environment variable that you must set is the PATH variable. This is the variable that tells the bash shell where to find different executable files and scripts. The shell will check the directories listed in the PATH variable for the script you are trying to find. Here is an example path.

With this example path, when you try to run a script in the terminal such as cat , bash will first look in the /usr/local/bin for this command. If it doesn't find it there, it will look in /usr/bin , and finally, /bin . If you need to modify the path, you can update it in your ~/.profile like so:

This will add the /home/zach/script-location directory to the beginning of the PATH variable. If you want to add it at the end, you can change the line to this:

With this new knowledge, we can create our own scripts and add those scripts to our path so we can run them automatically. Let's create a directory in our home folder that will hold all our custom scripts.

Add the following to my-simple-script .

Now make the script executable.

We need to add the new bin/ directory to our path. Open ~/.profile (or wherever you define your PATH environment variable), and add the following line.

Finally, you need to source ~/.profile to activate this new change.

You can now run your simple script from the command line by typing the name of it.

UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

How to assign a path to a variable.

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How to set your $PATH variable in Linux

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Being able to edit your $PATH is an important skill for any beginning POSIX user, whether you use Linux , BSD , or macOS.

When you type a command into the command prompt in Linux, or in other Linux-like operating systems, all you're doing is telling it to run a program. Even simple commands, like ls , mkdir , rm , and others are just small programs that usually live inside a directory on your computer called / usr /bin . There are other places on your system that commonly hold executable programs as well; some common ones include / usr /local/bin , / usr /local/ sbin , and / usr / sbin . Which programs live where, and why, is beyond the scope of this article, but know that an executable program can live practically anywhere on your computer: it doesn't have to be limited to one of these directories.

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When you type a command into your Linux shell, it doesn't look in every directory to see if there's a program by that name. It only looks to the ones you specify. How does it know to look in the directories mentioned above? It's simple: They are a part of an environment variable, called $PATH , which your shell checks in order to know where to look.

View your PATH

Sometimes, you may wish to install programs into other locations on your computer, but be able to execute them easily without specifying their exact location. You can do this easily by adding a directory to your $PATH . To see what's in your $PATH right now, type this into a terminal:

You'll probably see the directories mentioned above, as well as perhaps some others, and they are all separated by colons. Now let's add another directory to the list.

Set your PATH

Let's say you wrote a little shell script called hello.sh and have it located in a directory called /place/with/the/file . This script provides some useful function to all of the files in your current directory, that you'd like to be able to execute no matter what directory you're in.

Simply add /place/with/the/file to the $PATH variable with the following command:

You should now be able to execute the script anywhere on your system by just typing in its name, without having to include the full path as you type it.

Set your PATH permanently

But what happens if you restart your computer or create a new terminal instance? Your addition to the path is gone! This is by design. The variable $PATH is set by your shell every time it launches, but you can set it so that it always includes your new path with every new shell you open. The exact way to do this depends on which shell you're running.

Not sure which shell you're running? If you're using pretty much any common Linux distribution, and haven't changed the defaults, chances are you're running Bash. But you can confirm this with a simple command:

That's the "echo" command followed by a dollar sign ($) and a zero. $0 represents the zeroth segment of a command (in the command echo $0 , the word "echo" therefore maps to $1), or in other words, the thing running your command. Usually this is the  Bash shell , although there are others, including Dash, Zsh , Tcsh, Ksh, and Fish .

For Bash, you simply need to add the line from above, export PATH=$PATH:/place/with/the/file , to the appropriate file that will be read when your shell launches. There are a few different places where you could conceivably set the variable name: potentially in a file called ~/.bash_profile , ~/.bashrc , or ~/.profile. The difference between these files is (primarily) when they get read by the shell. If you're not sure where to put it, ~/.bashrc is a good choice.

For other shells, you'll want to find the appropriate place to set a configuration at start time; ksh configuration is typically found in ~/.kshrc , zsh uses ~/.zshrc . Check your shell's documentation to find what file it uses.

This is a simple answer, and there are more quirks and details worth learning. Like most everything in Linux, there is more than one way to do things, and you may find other answers which better meet the needs of your situation or the peculiarities of your Linux distribution. Happy hacking, and good luck, wherever your $PATH may take you.

This article was originally published in June 2017 and has been updated with additional information by the editor.

Related Content

Using a file path variable when executing a shell script

I'm experimenting with executing a Python script file via KM and, after reading a few forum posts, I thought I could use a KM variable to store the path to the Python file and use that in an Execute Shell Script action. I've created a simple action to test this:

I have the py_icoudpath variable set to /Users/me/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Coding/Python

But when I run the macro I get an error:

Execute a Shell Script failed with script error: ls: /Users/me/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Coding/Python: No such file or directory.

To protect against potential typos, I ran ls /Users/me/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com~apple~CloudDocs/Coding/Python in Terminal and got the expected output of the folder's contents.

Please could someone tell me where I am going wrong?

Try removing the backslash from your pathname. Works for me.

So it's ...Mobile Documents...

That works perfectly, thank you for the (nice and simple) solution!

You'll run into this a lot, so it might be worth knowing why @tiffle 's solution worked...

In the shell, a space separates the arguments to a command. So when there's a space in a file path you have to to the shell "this is a string with a space in it, not two separate arguments".

You can do that by quoting the path, which is what you did in your "Execute Shell Script" action. You can do that by "escaping" the space character with a preceding \ , which is what you did in Terminal. But when you do both you are including the literal \ in the file path, which is why it doesn't work.

I'm curious though: if I add the escaping backslash back into the variable and remove the quotes from the action, the escape character doesn't seem to work as the error shows the path truncated at the space: /Users/me/Library/Mobile\: No such file or directory . Why would this be?

It's all down to the weird and wonderful ways of variable expansion and the shell. Doing the same also fails in Terminal. Compare the following:

You're setting the variable to a single string (the \ escaping the space) but it isn't a literal \ , so the ls command gets the space-separated version unless you double-quote it. Things get even more complicated because, in the shell and in KM text boxes, \ is a special character and to include it as a literal you have to escape it with a \ ...

Not long after that, my head explodes...

Simplest solution is to not use \ but to always double-quote your path variables (the super-cautious also use brackets so the shell is in no doubt of the variable name):

Lots of good stuff about using KM variables in the shell and other scripts on the Wiki .

too funny...

I'm also a bit confused that both of your examples work fine in Terminal for me, but I can feel my brain starting to leak out of my ears again so time for a lie down I think!

Because your default shell in Terminal is zsh . Compare the following ( echo $0 prints the name of the current shell):

You can see that in zsh only one "No such file" error is reported -- no split on the space in the path -- while in bash there are two errors -- path is split on the space. To make things even more confusing, unless you've changed things the KM "Execute a Shell Script" action uses sh , which you can think of as the "lowest common denominator"...

Yet another reason to use quoted paths -- portability!

To confuse things even more, there's no sh in macOS -- it's actually bash run in sh -compatability mode!

Whenever you've a problem in an "Execute a Shell Script" action, start by checking that what you are doing works in sh and that your environment variables are what you expect them to be (KM "Shell Script" actions have their own, not necessarily the same as you have in Terminal). And, of course, that gives rise to another solution -- instead of making your script work in sh , make the shell suit your script:

Shell Test.kmmacros (2.6 KB)

Thank you again, that's a fantastic explanation and I can actually make sense of it, which is testament to its quality. It's also useful to have this understanding beyond its applicability to KM.

For all future shell scripts, I'll use the zsh shebang and make sure to quote (and probably bracket) my paths!

To make sure I'm not giving you the wrong idea...

You bracket the variable name to make sure the shell doesn't misinterpret it. The usual time you'll need it is in string interpolation, to show the shell where the variable name stops and the string starts:

Sorry, my mistake, I should have said "variables", not "paths". Thanks for the clarification and for the illustration (I wouldn't necessarily have thought of that potential problem or have known how to get around it if it occurred).

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File path with space as variable in bash script

I have some path with space

I need to pass this path to docker

And it doesn't work. It says there's no path /some/path . I also tried:

They don't work either

2 Answers 2

It's not a problem with variable assignment, you're doing it correctly. It's how you're using it.

Will, after substitution, become this:

You need to quote the argument to the docker command during invocation:

Alternatively quote just the variable. Bash merges adjacent strings, quoted or not.

• Would using parentheses in lieu of quotes also work, or would it still be incorrect after substitution? (in scripts, I always encompass path variables in parentheses [ $(my_path) ], but didn't know if that would return the correct substitution in this case) –  JW0914 Jul 9, 2021 at 11:07
• 1 @JW0914 That would evaluate my_path as a bash command and substitute in its result, without correct quoting. my_path is not a variable name but literal command with this syntax. The correct quoting for such substitution would be "$(my_path)" , or if you want to evaluate a variable "$("$my_path")" . –  gronostaj Jul 9, 2021 at 11:50
• 1 @JW0914 There's also the curly braces syntax ${my_path} which also doesn't affect quoting, but explicitly marks where the variable name ends and literal string begins. It also has some extra features in bash, like specifying default values if the variable is empty. –  gronostaj Jul 9, 2021 at 11:54
• I wonder docker itself needs some escaping (e.g. \040 ). The double quote will only make sure it is passed one parameter on the shell level. –  Tom Yan Jul 9, 2021 at 13:54

Use like this

docker run --rm --mount source="""$my_path""",target="""$some_other_path""",type=bind

• As it’s currently written, your answer is unclear. Please edit to add additional details that will help others understand how this addresses the question asked. You can find more information on how to write good answers in the help center . –  Community Bot Mar 19, 2022 at 5:27

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