PATH (all upper case) is the name of an environment variable on Unix-like operating systems, DOS, OS/2, and Microsoft Windows, specifying a set of directories where executable programs are searched for.
The PATH(all upper case) is an environment variable in the UNIX and Linux(and many other) operating systems. It contains colon delimited list of directories, where the shell searches through when a command is executed. The executables are stored in different directories in the UNIX and Linux operating systems.
Examples
Simple way to show the $PATH variable is:
echo "$PATH"
printf "%s\n" "$PATH"
A typical PATH looks like:
/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
Further reading
