Changing the environment variable permenantly in Ubuntu 10.10

Friends, I want to make change to environment PATH system wide. Because I have program called "md5". I want to execute it from anywhere (i.e any directory).

My md5 program is located at "/home/ahuq/MappingServer/md5_program". So what I did was to put: "export PATH=$PATH:/home/ahuq/MappingServer/md5_program" in the running SHELL. This only makes temporary changes and lets me run the "md5" program from anywhere temporarily. But I want to make this change permanent. So what I did was to put the "PATH=$PATH:/home/ahuq/MappingServer/md5_program" line into the "/etc/environment" file. This screwed everything up and then for a while I couldn't execute anything from SHELL. I knew the absolute path of "nano" editor and used it to modify the file (i.e. /et开发者_JS百科c/environment) back to its original condition. This fixed the problem and now I can run programs like "ls" from the SHELL.

But still I need a way to permanently add the path of "md5" to the environment. How can I do this in Ubuntu 10.10? Which file needs to edited?

Bye.

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It looks like your adding the 'program' to the path, you only want to add the directory to the path.

Try

PATH=$PATH:/home/ahuq/MappingServer

added to where your PATH is defined in a .profile.

I hope this helps.

P.S. as you appear to be a new user, if you get an answer that helps you please remember to mark it as accepted, and/or give it a + (or -) as a useful answer.