Adding Custom Scripts to Your PATH in Bash

Recently, I found myself repeatedly typing full paths just to run my own scripts. That got old quickly.

I wanted a way to call my personal Bash scripts from anywhere in the terminal without navigating to ~/scripts every time. The fix? Just add the folder to my $PATH.

Here’s the line I added to my ~/.bashrc:

export PATH="$PATH:/home/roy/scripts" # include my scripts folder in $PATH so can call from anywhere

Why I Did It

I’ve been building small utility scripts, things like automation, text parsing, and network checks, and I wanted them globally accessible just like regular commands (ls, ping, etc.).

Typing ~/scripts/myscript.sh every time was both slow and ugly. I wanted to be able to just run:

myscript.sh

from any directory in the terminal.

How It Works

The PATH environment variable tells your shell where to look for executable files. When you type a command, Bash checks each directory in $PATH (in order) to find the matching executable.

By appending :/home/roy/scripts to the existing $PATH, I’m telling Bash: “Hey, also check this folder when looking for commands.”

Adding it to ~/.bashrc ensures it gets applied every time I start a new terminal session.

Don't Forget

After editing ~/.bashrc, make sure to reload it with:

source ~/.bashrc

And your scripts need to be marked as executable:

chmod +x ~/scripts/myscript.sh

Final Result

Now I can just run myscript.sh from anywhere in my terminal. Faster, and way less typing.