Resolving path setting in ~/.profile file

[ranson]

There is a line in

~/.profile

which is

PATH="$HOME/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH"i

I don't know about the last "i".

Should I remove it or is it a syntax error?

[zenita]

It seems to be a syntax error, the actual .profile should look like below unless you changed things around (this is the 17.10 version, see notes below it):

# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
# the files are located in the bash-doc package.

# the default umask is set in /etc/profile; for setting the umask
# for ssh logins, install and configure the libpam-umask package.
#umask 022

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # include .bashrc if it exists
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
    . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

This is the result in Ubuntu 17.10 version while in the older version of Ubuntu, they check if the users bin directory is present was not included into the .profile. Easiest way to check how it should look like is by viewing at /etc/skel/.profile.

Simply place this at the end of your profile file:

# Manual addition for swift development snapshot
export PATH="$PATH:/home/jeremy/swift-4.0-DEVELOPMENT-SNAPSHOT-2017-06-29-a-ubuntu16.04/usr/bin"

If you ever mess up your profile completely, there is a copy where you can get a new one from in /etc/skel/.