Debian – How to add a path to system $PATH for all users’s non-login shell for debian

Make /etc/profile source /etc/bash.bashrc by adding [ -f /etc/bash.bashrc ] && . /etc/bash.bashrc to the end of /etc/profile, then add your path changes to /etc/bash.bashrc with PATH=$PATH:/some/other/path

Add a file with the value you want the PATH to have in /etc/profile.d. These files are setup to be sourced by shells such as Bash, Csh Zsh, or tcsh.

Example

We needed to have the following value added to our PATH.

/usr/local/share/bin

So we created a file, /etc/profile.d/ourstuff.sh, with the following line in it:

export PATH=/usr/local/share/bin:$PATH

Files with the extension .sh are sourced by shells such as Bash and Zsh. Files with the extension .csh are sourced by Csh and tcsh.

EDIT #1 - Follow-up

OP asked the following follow-up question.

Yes, but what about cron jobs? Is there a way to get the path even there? cron doesn't seem to call /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc.

To which I responded:

Correct it doesn't nor will it. You need to set the SHELL=/bin/bash in cron to override the default shell (typically /bin/sh). Also you can set the this for user crons, BASH_ENV="$HOME/.bashrc", and this for system crons, BASH_ENV="/root/.bashrc". Would be one way around this.

I would highly suggest that you not do this. Let the scripts that need a specific environment, set it up themselves. Don't try to solve every problem at the global level!