This behavior has persisted in /etc/environment now for at least 3 years, with only one report of misbehavior as a result. I don't believe it's worth the effort to try to correct this now and risk getting inconsistent behavior on upgraded vs. newly-installed systems, especially as pam_env, which owns /etc/environment, *does* parse out the quotes from variable assignments.
If something else is reading /etc/environment directly, bypassing pam_env, and parsing it differently than pam_env itself does, then as Colin says, this is a bug in that component. I'm therefore reassigning this bug report to the krb5 package, as this needs to be fixed in krb5 -rsh-server. ** Package changed: pam (Ubuntu) => krb5 (Ubuntu) -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/251795 Title: /etc/environment PATH should not have quotes -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs