Friday 29 February 2008

Modifying PATH in Leopard

Apple has (regrettably, in my opinion) changed the way to modify the bash PATH variable system-wide. The old way was to carefully edit the file /etc/profile. The new way is quite different. Suppose you have the application MyNewApplication in /usr/local and want to include the directory /usr/local/MyNewApplication/bin in the PATH. Then what you do is
  • Go to directory /etc/paths.d (yes, that's a directory) and create a file called MyNewApplication
  • Edit the file MyNewApplication with the directory you want to include, i. e. /usr/local/MyNewApplication/bin. If you want to include more than one path of MyNewApplication, then add more lines (one line per path)
  • Restart the Terminal
I don't agree with this approach which breaks a standard UNIX feature. This is most likely to be the reason why LaTeXiT is having troubles.

1 comment:

Daniele Avitabile said...

Do you know what system-wide means? Read before writing nonsense. I should trash your comment. Hope you'll read mine. Please learn how to read and write before commenting.

Best.

Daniele