On Tue, Aug 04, 2020 at 12:25:11PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote: > I just created a /home/me/AppImage directory, moved some appimages into > it, and added another stanza to add that to my .profile. Do I have to > logout the 15 processes or so I have running now and effectively restart > the system to make that path take effect? Closing all konsole sessions > on this workspace and opening fresh konsole's is not bringing that path > into effect.
It depends on several things. You say you're using konsole, so does that mean you're running KDE? If so, are you logging in via sddm, which is what KDE on Debian normally uses? If all of those things are true, then editing .profile probably doesn't do anything at all. An sddm login running a Debian X11 session which runs KDE shouldn't be reading the .profile file. Ever. Are you logging in on a console and running startx? In that case, your .profile *will* be read, by your console login shell, and the changes to PATH and other environmental bits and bobs will all be inherited by the X11 session, then by the window manager, then by the terminals which are children of the window manager, and then by the shell run inside the terminal, and then by the programs launched by the shell. If you aren't using startx from a console login, then the right place to make modifications to PATH would be in the ~/.xsessionrc file. I *just* got done saying all this stuff last week. Now, your immediate question was how to make the PATH change take effect in all of your existing terminal windows, without having to log out and back in. There's no single command that'll just blast it out to all of them. Each one is an independent self-contained process, with its own separate copy of the environment. You'll have to go around to each window, one by one. The most straightforward way to do it would be to paste your PATH=... command into each window. If you don't like that approach, you could add your PATH=... to your ~/.bashrc file (assuming you use bash) temporarily. Then in each window, run "exec bash" to run a new shell, which will read the ~/.bashrc file, which will pick up the PATH change. When all of the windows have been re-shelled, you can edit ~/.bashrc again to remove the PATH=... command, since you don't want it to stay there.
