PATH in Alfred workflows

[oulipo]

I encountered a bug in one of my workflow documented here http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/2431-weird-behavior-of-youtube-dl that is due to the fact that `youtube-dl` would not find `ffmpeg` in the PATH when launched from Alfred,

 

I fixed that with a hacky `export PATH=/usr/local/bin/:$PATH` at the start of the workflow, but how would one generally go about doing that in a more robust way ?

 

 

[jdfwarrior]

I encountered a bug in one of my workflow documented here http://www.alfredforum.com/topic/2431-weird-behavior-of-youtube-dl that is due to the fact that `youtube-dl` would not find `ffmpeg` in the PATH when launched from Alfred,

 

I fixed that with a hacky `export PATH=/usr/local/bin/:$PATH` at the start of the workflow, but how would one generally go about doing that in a more robust way ?

 

Adding to the $PATH variable or specifying full path to the external utilities you need is the method most users choose.

[oulipo]

Okay, thanks for the answer

 

However, in this case it is not directly the utility I use, but rather an utility (ffmpeg) used by the utility (youtube-dl) I use. Is there a way to load the user's default $PATH variable when launching Alfred script? (it seems that the PATH must not be the correct one since it had not found `ffmpeg`

[vitor]

Okay, thanks for the answer

 

However, in this case it is not directly the utility I use, but rather an utility (ffmpeg) used by the utility (youtube-dl) I use. Is there a way to load the user's default $PATH variable when launching Alfred script? (it seems that the PATH must not be the correct one since it had not found `ffmpeg`

 

Well, yes and no. The problem is that it depends, and there is no one solution. For example, if you’ve set your PATH in your ~/.bashrc file, you can easily put something like

source "${HOME}/.bashrc"

on top of the workflow’s code, and it’ll get it (along with everything else). But what if the user did it in ~/.bash_profile, or uses another shell, like zsh? That’s why you can’t really (easily) cover every case, but can make it fit your needs with a simple tweak.

Edited May 16, 2013 by Vítor