Add a single Bash command

Question

I do not have su access and I have a perl executable in ~/et directory which is called exiftool.

I need to add that executable to bash commands (so that I can type exiftool instead of ~/et/exiftool).

The problem is that ~/et contains other files that are not executable (so I cannot use export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/et). Is there any alternative?

Answer 1

You could use an alias:

alias exiftool=~/et/exiftool

Or you can symlink it elsewhere and add that directory to your path:

mkdir -p ~/bin
ln -s ~/et/exiftool ~/bin
PATH=$HOME/bin:$PATH

Answer 2

I don't understand why having files that are not executable in the directory prevents you from adding the directory to your PATH anyway?

As an alternative, though, you can use an alias.

alias exiftool=$HOME/et/exiftool

You can place this in your .bashrc to have it always available.

Answer 3

1. softlink to a folder in PATH
2. alias exiftool='~/et/exiftool'