Adjusting your PATH temporarily

Temporarily adjust your path by running the following two commands:

PATH=/QOpenSys/pkgs/bin:$PATH
export PATH

After that, typing commands should find RPM-installed open source tools (if using bash already, you may need to run hash -r, like the following example

$ bash --version
GNU bash, version 4.4.12(1)-release (powerpc-ibm-os400)
Copyright (C) 2016 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
License GPLv3+: GNU GPL version 3 or later <http://gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html>

This is free software; you are free to change and redistribute it.
There is NO WARRANTY, to the extent permitted by law.

HIGHLY Recommended: adjust your PATH permanently

If you want to make your PATH setting permanent, add the above line to your $HOME/.profile and/or your $HOME/.bash_profile (if you are using bash). You can do this easily (from a shell) like so.

touch $HOME/.profile
setccsid 1208 $HOME/.profile
echo 'PATH=/QOpenSys/pkgs/bin:$PATH' >> $HOME/.profile
echo 'export PATH' >> $HOME/.profile

To make this change for all users, put these lines in /QOpenSys/etc/profile, like so:

touch /QOpenSys/etc/profile
setccsid 1208 /QOpenSys/etc/profile
echo 'PATH=/QOpenSys/pkgs/bin:$PATH' >> /QOpenSys/etc/profile
echo 'export PATH' >> /QOpenSys/etc/profile

Need to run globally-installed Node.js modules, or choose a Node.js version on a per-user basis?

To run node-gyp or other globally-installed modules, or to switch the default version of Node.js for a specific user, place /QOpenSys/pkgs/lib/nodejs<version>/bin at the beginning of the user’s PATH environment variable. For instance, that user could run the following from the shell to set their default to version 10:

touch $HOME/.profile
setccsid 1208 $HOME/.profile
echo 'PATH=/QOpenSys/pkgs/lib/nodejs10/bin:/QOpenSys/pkgs/bin:$PATH' >> $HOME/.profile
echo 'export PATH' >> $HOME/.profile

(if using bash as the shell, the user may need to run hash -r)

Verifying that your PATH is set correctly

Simply run the following from your operating environment:

echo $PATH

The output should be a :-delimited list of directories. These will be searched, in order, for any commands entered into your shell. The PATH should contain, at minimum, /QOpenSys/pkgs/bin, very preferrably before the “standard” paths like /QOpenSys/usr/bin or /usr/bin. You may also see other PATHS you added to the beginning, for instance, to choose a Node.js version per the Node.js usage notes

For example: Horrible

/usr/bin:.:/QOpenSys/usr/bin

Bad

/QOpenSys/usr/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/QOpenSys/usr/bin/X11:/usr/sbin:.:/usr/bin

Marginal

/QOpenSys/usr/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/QOpenSys/usr/bin/X11:/usr/sbin:.:/usr/bin:/QOpenSys/pkgs/bin

Best

/QOpenSys/pkgs/bin:/QOpenSys/usr/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/QOpenSys/usr/bin/X11:/usr/sbin:.:/usr/bin