$PATH is different in Vim that in parent shell

[John Magolske]

I'm finding that $PATH is different in Vim than in the parent shell.
In a shell I see that $PATH reflects what's in my ~/.zshrc :

% echo $SHELL
/bin/zsh
% echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:\
/home/john/bin:/home/john/git/scripts:/home/john/.cabal/bin:\
/home/john/context/tex/texmf-linux/bin

But within a Vim session launched in that same terminal:

:!echo $SHELL
/bin/zsh
:!echo $PATH
/home/john/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:\
/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/NX/bin

... $PATH is different. So when using a shell script located in
/home/john/git/scripts in a mapping in my vimrc, it's necessary to
write out the full path to the executable. Seems this should be
easy to figure out, but searching around I can't come up with an
explanation as to why $PATH is different in Vim.

Thanks for any help,

John

--
John Magolske
http://B79.net/contact

[Marc Weber]

You can change PATH in vim (as you can change any env var):

let $PATH='/no-such/dir'

and then try :!echo 'hello world'

your shell will no longer be found.

Why is your vim's PATH different? Don't know

vim -V20/tmp/log will show you all viml lines. grep for PATH.

If this doesn't help you the I don't know how to debug it.

env vars can also be changed for child processes, see man exec.
However this should not happen in your shell.

Marc Weber

[Paul]

On Saturday, 23 June, 2012 at 21:24:55 BST, John Magolske wrote:
>I'm finding that $PATH is different in Vim than in the parent shell.

It looks like you have your PATH set in two different places. Have a look at :help :! and :help shellcmdflag - set it to -ic to see if it helps.

--

.

[John Magolske]

* Paul <googl...@rainslide.net> [120623 16:25]:

Yes, after doing :set shellcmdflag=-ic to specify that vim use an
interactive shell I see PATH as what I have set in my ~/.zshrc.
But placing "set shellcmdflag=-ic" in my ~/.vimrc creates a behavior
where when Vim is launched it is immediately suspended and I have to
issue `fg` to bring it to the foreground.

Digging around for where else PATH could be set, I found this in
/etc/zsh/zshenv (came from installing Debian via the grml distro) :

if (( EUID != 0 )); then
PATH="$HOME/bin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/sbin:\
/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/games:/usr/NX/bin$ADDONS"
else
PATH="/sbin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/X11R6/bin:\
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/NX/bin$ADDONS"
fi

Ah...the same path I see when doing :!echo $PATH in Vim.

Commenting out those lines solved the problem not only for Vim, but
for other applications as well (vifm also saw that non-desired PATH).

Thanks for the helpful clues!