Add directory to $PATH if it's not already there

From my .bashrc:

pathadd() {
    if [ -d "$1" ] && [[ ":$PATH:" != *":$1:"* ]]; then
        PATH="${PATH:+"$PATH:"}$1"
    fi
}

Note that PATH should already be marked as exported, so reexporting is not needed. This checks whether the directory exists & is a directory before adding it, which you may not care about.

Also, this adds the new directory to the end of the path; to put at the beginning, use PATH="$1${PATH:+":$PATH"}" instead of the above PATH= line.

Expanding on Gordon Davisson's answer, this supports multiple arguments

pathappend() {
  for ARG in "$@"
  do
    if [ -d "$ARG" ] && [[ ":$PATH:" != *":$ARG:"* ]]; then
        PATH="${PATH:+"$PATH:"}$ARG"
    fi
  done
}

So you can do pathappend path1 path2 path3 ...

For prepending,

pathprepend() {
  for ((i=$#; i>0; i--)); 
  do
    ARG=${!i}
    if [ -d "$ARG" ] && [[ ":$PATH:" != *":$ARG:"* ]]; then
        PATH="$ARG${PATH:+":$PATH"}"
    fi
  done
}

Similar to pathappend, you can do

pathprepend path1 path2 path3 ...

Here's something from my answer to this question combined with the structure of Doug Harris' function. It uses Bash regular expressions:

add_to_path ()
{
    if [[ "$PATH" =~ (^|:)"${1}"(:|$) ]]
    then
        return 0
    fi
    export PATH=${1}:$PATH
}