How to set the $PATH as used by applications in os x

Question

I'm using ant to build my project, and use the 'svnversion' executable to insert a version id into my sources for easy tracking of versions.

Running this ant file from the command line works, I've set my $PATH in .profile to include the path to svnversion and it works fine.

Now I try and run this same ant file from inside Eclipse and that does not work - the PATH in eclipse is set in another way than the PATH of the shell, I suspect this has to be set in a plist somewhere, but I don't know where.

Answer 1

Correct -- it's in the plist file

~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

This file actually contains key-value pairs for any environment variables you want to set, for the whole login session. Unlike .profile/.cshrc etc, it's available to GUI programs. Unfortunately, you can't access other environment variables (e.g., you can't use $HOME) or use any other programmatic constructs here.

Update: note that this is no longer supported under OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, alas.

Answer 2

A quick search at developer.apple.com turned up Setting environment variables for user processes.

Answer 3

On Mac OS X El Capitan (10.11.5), this works for me for per-user PATH entries (and other environment variables, for that matter).

• create a file $HOME/.profile
• set all PATH related variables in that file

• (if using bash), have your .bash_profile source that file, and .bashrc. This should be the entire contents of your .bash_profile:

  # $HOME.bash_profile: source $HOME/.profile source $HOME/.bashrc

Near as I can tell, Mac OS does not source .bash_profile on login for PATH, presumably because that is often very slow to run (initializing bash completion etc). It does seem to read $HOME/.profile.

You still need a $HOME/.bash_profile to trigger bash to read $HOME/.bashrc, which it otherwise wouldn't do for interactive, non-login terminals as the ones created by Terminal.app.