title: How to have Chef reload global PATH
body: <p>I am setting up a simple Chef recipe to install a binary app. There is no package for it in Ubuntu or CentOS so I'm writing a recipe that does the following:</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Downloads the tar from source</li>
  <li>Extracts contents from tar</li>
  <li>Creates a bash script that adds the app_home to the global $PATH (it needs to be global)</li>
  <li>Reloads $PATH so the current logged in user can refer to it in the shell commands</li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>I am good up to step 3, but I cannot get Chef to reload $PATH. I have tried placing the new <strong><em>export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/app/bin</em></strong> in both <code>.bash_profile</code> as well as <code>/etc/profile.d/</code> with no success.</p>
  
  <p>If I exit the shell and re-ssh I see the PATH correctly, but never in the same session as when I ran <code>sudo chef-client</code>.</p>
  
  <p>Is there any way that Chef can <code>touch</code> or reload the PATH automatically so that the current logged in user can make use of it?</p>