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ofek / userpath

Cross-platform tool for adding locations to the user PATH, no elevated privileges required!
MIT License
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Entries in system PATH are duplicated to user PATH on modification #23

Closed ralish closed 4 years ago

ralish commented 4 years ago

On Windows the handling of updating the user's PATH is flawed: https://github.com/ofek/userpath/blob/30a143c4f3b9a794c0c3e99ca7b76f47e20744fe/userpath/interface.py#L36

As the current PATH value is taken directly from the process environment it contains both the system and user's PATH values. The subsequent call to SetEnvironmentVariable() will set all these paths in the user's PATH variable, duplicating those paths already set in the system PATH.

An additional more subtle problem is that any changes to the PATH environment variable made in the process's environment (or inherited from parent processes), but which have not been persisted to the Windows registry, will inadvertently be persisted by the current approach. That is, a caller may end up adding multiple additional entries to the user's PATH instead of only the intended path.

Both issues can be handled by retrieving the user's PATH setting with GetEnvironmentVariable() (as done in location_in_new_path()) instead of using the PATH from the process environment.

ofek commented 4 years ago

@ralish Thank you! Can you please try this: https://github.com/ofek/userpath/pull/24

ralish commented 4 years ago

@ofek Flawless. Thanks for the extremely quick fix!