In a Dockerfile, How to update PATH environment variable?

Although the answer that Gunter posted was correct, it is not different than what I already had posted. The problem was not the ENV directive, but the subsequent instruction RUN export $PATH

There's no need to export the environment variables, once you have declared them via ENV in your Dockerfile.

As soon as the RUN export ... lines were removed, my image was built successfully

[I mentioned this in response to the selected answer, but it was suggested to make it more prominent as an answer of its own]

It should be noted that

ENV PATH="/opt/gtk/bin:${PATH}" 

may not be the same as

ENV PATH="/opt/gtk/bin:$PATH" 

The former, with curly brackets, might provide you with the host's PATH. The documentation doesn't suggest this would be the case, but I have observed that it is. This is simple to check just do RUN echo $PATH and compare it to RUN echo ${PATH}

You can use Environment Replacement in your Dockerfile as follows:

ENV PATH="${PATH}:/opt/gtk/bin"