How to reset $PATH after accidentally setting it to something nonsense?

Question

I'm on Mac OS X High Sierra. I was doing an scp command, repeated several times so I wanted to be clever and just set the variable $IMAGE for the image name and $PATH if I needed to add an extra path to it. Well, I set the $PATH variable to "page-attachments" so naturally no linux commands will work in the CLI now. I can't even try to redefine $PATH. Any command returns

-bash: page-attachments: command not found

Is there a way for me to reset it to whatever it was? I can't vim .bashrc or .bash_profile because even vim doesn't work now. I'm not sure if it was /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin or something else or what other repercussions there are.

I just came back to delete my post. The variable was only defined for that tab, so using a new tab reset it. I know that's basic but it was my first time using variables in CLI and not in bash scripts. — Christia, Mar 28 '19 at 11:33

score 5 · Answer 1 · edited Mar 28 '19 at 13:16

5

You could use something along the lines of:

PATH=$(/usr/bin/getconf PATH)

to use the full path to getconf, which will return a stock PATH value that you can use going forward.

edited Mar 28 '19 at 13:16

Kusalananda

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answered Mar 28 '19 at 13:14

Jeff Schaller

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How to reset $PATH after accidentally setting it to something nonsense?

1 Answers1