[BUG] walinuxagent does not read environment variable PATH

I updated the PATH variable on my VM, but the walinuxagent seems not to pick up the changes, and uses and odd value for it. Steps followed:

• update system-wide PATH by modifying /etc/environment
• restart the VM

If I ssh into the machine and perform the following commands:

• sudo su (to impersonate the user root)
• echo $PATH the returned value is correct.

If I execute echo $PATH in Azure Portal through the ‘Run command’ panel of the VM, a different value is returned in the output (different even from the one before I made the change). I also executed the commands whoami (to be sure I am using the same user root in both cases) and more /etc/environment (to check that the right value is still there). I tried to re-install and restart the agent, but not difference in the outcome.

• Distro and Version: Ubuntu 16.04 (Data Science Machine)
• WALinuxAgent version. Output of waagent --version: WALinuxAgent-2.2.32.2 running on ubuntu 16.04 Python: 3.5.2 Goal state agent: 2.2.40

[vrdmr]

My hypothesis is that the later two path variables (/usr/games:/usr/local/games) were added after the service (/usr/bin/python3 -u /usr/sbin/waagent -daemon) started. And the service never got it (becuase of our configuration of the unit file - eg: Ubuntu does not have environment key in the service section.)

This is an issue, especially if the environment variables are not being picked up. I will test it with 18.04 VMs as well.

[stawo]

@vrdmr , thanks a lot for the hard work! Hope 18.04 doesn’t show this behavior and that the Data Science Machine will be updated to that version.