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

There are two type of shells at play here.

• Non-login: .bashrc is reloaded every time you start a new copy of Bash
• Login: The .profile is loaded only when you either login, or explicitly tell Bash to load it and use it as a login shell.

It's important to understand here that with Bash, file .bashrc is only read by a shell that's both interactive and non-login, and you will find that people often load .bashrc in .bash_profile to overcome this limitation.

Now that you have the basic understanding, let’s move on to how I would advice you to set it up.

• .profile: create it non-existing. Put your PATH setup in there.
• .bashrc: create if non-existing. Put all your aliases and custom methods in there.
• .bash_profile: create if non-existing. Put the following in there.

.bash_file:

#!/bin/bash
source ~/.profile # Get the PATH settings
source ~/.bashrc  # Get Aliases and Functions
#