Error when add nextflow to PATH variable

Question

[Chris]

Hi all,

After running:

export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/nextflow

when I type nextflow, I still got: -bash: nextflow: command not found

./nextflow works.

Would you please explain why? Thank you so much!

Update: I create a new folder and move nextflow to it folder then it worked.

Answer 1

[Marcel Ribeiro-Dantas]

If you have the nextflow binary in your $HOME directory and you're adding the path including the file to PATH, e.g. export PATH=$PATH:/Users/mribeirodantas/nextflow, then it indeed will fail. You have to set it like that:

export PATH=$PATH:/Users/mribeirodantas

Another issue that you may run into is that this approach only applies to the current bash session. If you open a new session, the default PATH will be the one taken into consideration. You can change your $HOME/.bashrc to make sure you always have the PATH environment variable including the path to your nextflow binary.

[Chris]

Thank you so much! Also, log out and log in back to make it works.