CODEWITHSUNDEEP
shellvisual-studio-codeterminalpathwindows-subsystem-for-linux
Russell Knight
Russell Knight

Reputation: 49

$PATH in VSCODE terminal through WSL2 not set correctly

I'm running Ubuntu-20.04 through WSL2 on my Windows 10 laptop. I've started having an issue in VSCode where the integrated terminal isn't getting its $PATH initialized correctly.

If I open an Ubuntu shell through Windows Terminal and run echo $PATH I get the following output:

/home/<user>/bin:/home/<user>/.nvm/versions/node/v15.1.0/bin:/usr/lib/jvm/java-1.11.0-openjdk-amd64/bin:/opt/devkitpro/tools/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games:/usr/local/games:/mnt/c/Program Files/Common Files/Oracle/Java/javapath:/mnt/c/Program Files (x86)/Common Files/Oracle/Java/javapath:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/system32:/mnt/c/WINDOWS:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/Wbem:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/WindowsPowerShell/v1.0/:/mnt/c/WINDOWS/System32/OpenSSH/:/mnt/c/Program Files (x86)/ATI Technologies/ATI.ACE/Core-Static:/mnt/c/Program Files (x86)/AMD/ATI.ACE/Core-Static:/mnt/c/Program Files (x86)/Calibre2/:/mnt/c/Program Files/Calibre2/:/mnt/c/Program Files/PuTTY/:/mnt/c/Program Files/FileBot/:/mnt/c/Users/<User>/AppData/Local/Microsoft/WindowsApps:/mnt/c/Users/<User>/AppData/Local/Programs/Microsoft VS Code/bin:/snap/bin

However once connected to WSL through VSCode if I run the same command in the integrated terminal I get:

/home/<user>/.local/bin

This means I can't even run the most basic commands like ls.

I can't understand why this is happening? Is there some setting in VSCode that would be interfering with my shell initialization, preventing $PATH from getting set correctly? I can't even run env to see what other environmental variables are doing.

The default shell in VSCode is set to bash.

It is my understanding that bash reads instructions from /etc/profile which sets shell variables. Could there be any reason these instruction are not being read?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 1863

Answers (1)

Russell Knight
Russell Knight

Reputation: 49

Ok so I figured out what was causing the issue.

In my .bashrc, I had added the line:

export `PATH="/home/<user>/.local/bin"`

presumably to be able to access programs located there from any directory. For whatever reason this wasn't causing an issue when a shell was launched from Windows Terminal, but VS Code did not like it! Simply removing the aforementioned line from .bashrc solved the problem.

Guess I've got a lot to learn about .bashrc, .bash_profile, etc., and how these are accessed when starting up a bash shell. If anyone wants to shed light on this, feel free to comment below.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions