On 21/05/06, Kevin O'Gorman <kogorman@gmail.com> wrote:
>  Does anyone know a nice little idiom for de-duping a colon-list like PATH
> or MANPATH?

Yeah this is something that constantly annoyed me, I forget where I
found this (although I moved it to a function), it is not of my
creation.

To ensure no confusion with the below paste, I have additionally
placed this in a text file:
http://kutzooi.co.uk/cleanpath.sh.txt

function cleanpath {
                # Removes duplicates from PATH style variables
        local variable='PATH'
        if [ $# -eq 1 ]
        then
                variable="$1"
        fi
        local var="${1:-${variable}}" oldpath newpath=: entry
        oldpath="${!var}:"
        while [ -n "$oldpath" ]; do
                entry="${oldpath%%:*}"
                oldpath="${oldpath#*:}"
                [ "${entry:0:1}" = / ] && [ -n "${newpath##*:$entry:*}" ] && \
                        [ -d "$entry" ] && newpath="$newpath$entry:"
        done
        newpath="${newpath#:}"
        eval "$var"'="${newpath%:}"'
}

cleanpath                                       # defaults to PATH
cleanpath MANPATH
cleanpath LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Hope this helps.
Mark

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