ep prints the elements of PATH one per line. Editing is also possible when combined with a shell's eval and command substitution features.
To print elements one per line:
ep print
If PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin, the output is:
/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
To edit: The following ep commands help with editing PATH by outputting the
desired new “PATH=...” string to stdout. This alone changes nothing, but you
can add command substitution and eval to cause changes. The following examples
use Bourne shell syntax.
To add an element at the front:
PATH=$(ep prepend /usr/local/ghcup/bin)
To add an element at the end:
PATH=$(ep append /usr/local/ghcup/bin)
To delete an element—first match by string equality:
PATH=$(ep delete /usr/local/ghcup/bin)
To help with arbitrary editing, ep read reads elements from stdin, expecting
one element per line, and composes them into a PATH=... string. (So, dual and
inverse of ep print in most senses.) You can combine this with ep print and
a line-oriented stream editor. Example:
PATH=$(ep print | sed -e s/jdk7/jdk8/ | ep read)
For manual editing, you can also start with ep print > tmpfile, edit tmpfile,
then PATH=$(ep read < tmpfile). The line-oriented format is more ergonomic to
work with than one huge colon-separated line.
ep read -b additionally dumps the old PATH value to stderr for your
backup purposes.
In a future version, this -b flag will also be added to the other editing
commands.