Set environment variables on Mac OS X Lion

Question

When someone says \"edit your .plist file\" or \"your .profile\" or \".bash_profile\" etc, this just confuses me. I have no idea where these files are, how to create them if

Answer 1

echo $PATH

it prints current path value

Then do vim ~/.bash_profile and write

export PATH=$PATH:/new/path/to/be/added

here you are appending to the old path, so preserves the old path and adds your new path to it

then do

source ~/.bash_profile

this will execute it and add the path

then again check with

echo $PATH