Setting environment variables on OS X

Question

What is the proper way to modify environment variables like PATH in OS X?

I\'ve looked on Google a little bit and found three different files to edit:

Answer 1

After chasing the Environment Variables preference pane and discovering that the link is broken and a search on Apple's site seems to indicate they've forgotten about it... I started back onto the trail of the elusive launchd process.

On my system (Mac OS X 10.6.8) it appears that variables defined in environment.plist are being reliably exported to apps launched from Spotlight (via launchd). My trouble is that those vars are not being exported to new bash sessions in Terminal. I.e. I have the opposite problem as portrayed here.

NOTE: environment.plist looks like JSON, not XML, as described previously

I was able to get Spotlight apps to see the vars by editing ~/MacOSX/environment.plist and I was able to force the same vars into a new Terminal session by adding the following to my .profile file:

eval $(launchctl export)