Comments on: Mac OS X Tip: Setting PATH environment variables

By: Jess

Jess — Sun, 19 Sep 2010 15:43:35 +0000

Hey Mark -

You said:
> On linux I used to edit my .bashrc file to do this, but the version of bash on Mac OS X (10.5.2) doesn’t seem to support this

This isn’t exactly true. the .bashrc file is still used for executable shells in OSX, however it’s he .bash_profile that is used in login shells (like the Terminal). You’ll want to edit to add paths, like this:

export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/mysql/bin

regards

By: Luc

Luc — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 13:35:47 +0000

Thanks Felipe. There are many different ways to change PATH at startup, but this is the one I like most. (I’m using OS X 10.6.) Just one thing: the path in the file mysql has to end with a newline, otherwise it won’t be added properly to PATH.

Cheers
Luc

By: Cheule

Cheule — Sat, 26 Dec 2009 17:00:33 +0000

The good thing about using a profile configuration file like .bashrc, is that if you ever migrate your home folder to a new machine/OS X install, all your changes go with you. If you edit things in /etc you are unlikely you retain such changes.

The place to put such changes in OS X 10.4 / 10.5 / 10.6 is in ~/.profile . Specifically, I added the line “export PATH=$PATH:~/bin” (no quotes) to my ~/.profile file in order to allow me to install binaries into ~/bin.

By: Werner

Werner — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 16:11:50 +0000

Mark and Felipe,

many thanks! This helped me with an issue of webkit-image, a unix tool used for the JOSM editor of OpenStreetMap!

Cheers,
Werner

By: Russell

Russell — Sat, 16 May 2009 06:48:51 +0000

Additional info…

The path value in the file in Felipe’s step 3 above is a clean/plain text path, not the path you’d type in a shell to set the PATH environment variable.

I used this technique for a path that had spaces in one of the folder names and when I had the backslash escapes, it wasn’t working. Removing the backslashes made it work like a charm.

Instead of these:
export PATH=$PATH:/Developer/Applications/PLT\ Scheme\ v4.1.5/bin
/Developer/Applications/PLT\ Scheme\ v4.1.5/bin

Use just this:
/Developer/Applications/PLT Scheme v4.1.5/bin

Regards,
-Russell

By: Jyothirmayee

Jyothirmayee — Mon, 09 Mar 2009 11:37:25 +0000

Mark, Thanks so much for sharing this.

After almost 2 days I landed on your blog. I wonder why most of the top results in google are misleading and there is nothing that is easily found on apple developers section either. You saved my day!

By: Marla

Marla — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:12:42 +0000

Thank you both! I’m also from unix but could find no dot file in my home dir where I set my path, but looking at the value of PATH, I obviously HAD modified it at least once in the past! Sure enough, I had added something under paths.d, just four months ago, too.

What also drives me crazy is that when I search using spotlight, it ignores everything under /etc. Guess I have to go back to using good old find from / if I really want to find things related to system administration.

By: sirus

sirus — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 14:17:21 +0000

On Mac OS X exists a file that has the same role of the ~/.bashrc file on Linux and it’s the ~/.bash_profile file.

By: Felipe

Felipe — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 05:34:47 +0000

Hey there Mark.

I just read this post, great info. But after digging a little I found out that you can use another method to do what you’re saying. You just have to create a file inside /etc/paths.d ; for instance if I’d like to append the mysql directory to the PATH I would do this:

1) Create the file /etc/paths.d/mysql like this:
sudo touch /etc/paths.d/mysql
2) Edit the file:
sudo vim /etc/paths.d/mysql
3) Put the path inside the file:
/usr/local/mysql/bin

I posted three steps so everyone knows what they’re doing, but you could do it all by just creating the file and filling it with the path needed in PATH.

I think this method works better because it is more ordered at the end and you would have a file for each path you want to create for every program that needs it.

Hope this helps.
Cheers. Felipe.