PATH isn’t real on Linux

I have no idea how much relevance this short but informative rundown of how PATH works in Linux has in the real world, but I found it incredibly interesting and enlightening.

The basic gist – and I might be wrong, there’s code involved and I’m not very smart – is that Linux itself needs absolute paths to binaries, while shells and programming languages do not. In other words, the Linux kernel does not know about PATH, and any lookup you’re doing comes from either the shell or the programming language you’re using.

In practice this doesn’t matter, but it’s still interesting to know.