config dmenu not picking up user $PATH

asked Nov 20 '14

Jeff Bauer
57 ●4 ●5 ●11 http://www.python.org/

updated Nov 20 '14

When running dmenu, my local $HOME/bin scripts aren't being picked up. So I checked the value of $PATH by writing a cheat script that dmenu would run.

Sure enough, $HOME/bin was not included in the output:

/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin

So perhaps the culprit is how .bashrc is configured?

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

Aha!

So I move the $PATH assignment in .bashrc before it can exit for not running interactively:

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

# If not running interactively, don't do anything
[ -z "$PS1" ] && return

But still no luck. My current workaround is to change the config file to call a script with a wrapped dmenu command, dmenu.sh:

bindsym $mod+d exec ~/bin/dmenu.sh

The contents of my ~/bin/dmenu.sh:

#!/bin/bash
PATH=~/bin:$PATH dmenu_run

Does anyone have a better solution?

My environment: Xubuntu 14.04