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Weird behaviour with zsh PATH

I just encourage a weird problem with zsh today.

My environment is Mac OS X Yosemite, zsh 5.0.5 (x86_64-apple-darwin14.0)

In .zshrc, I have manually set the PATH variable to something like

export PATH="$PATH:~/.composer/vendor/bin"

Try echo $PATH in terminal, the result is as expected (contained ~/.composer/vendor/bin). Then try executing a binary from ~/.composer/vendor/bin, It'll always return me "zsh: command not found" error.

Try switching to bash, echo $PATH is also as expected, have the same result as zsh shell. Try executing a binary from ~/.composer/vendor/bin, no problem found. Seem the PATH var is acting well on the bash shell.

What's wrong with my zsh shell?

Thanks

Solution

  • Try using $HOME instead of ~. In many situations, shells do not expand ~ when you expect them to and it is usually better to use $HOME. ~ is really only intended to be a short cut for interactive use. (The only case I can recall where ~ was preferred was in a .gitalias, where ~ was expanded and variables were not.)