The Four Ways To Set Your Path On Mac OSX

Number three will surprise you! This post courtesy of the six hours I spent trying to figure out how the hell RVM still had stuff in my $PATH.

.bashrc/.bash_profile/.profile

I was reading a blogpost that recommended using ctags, so I decided to install it. Turns out, I already had it installed but it wasn’t first in the $PATH so bash couldn’t find it. That’s odd, because brew is usually pretty good at setting up symlinks. echo $PATH gave me some enormous list, ending with a bunch of RVM directories that don’t even exist! I switched to chruby months ago. So I double checked, and found a couple lines in .bash_profile that were adding rvm. I removed them, but it didn’t fix the problem.

/etc/paths

I had to go deeper. Where does the default $PATH get set? The one the system itself uses to find programs, before it reads .bashrc. Courtesy of this StackOverflow question, I learned that on a mac, there’s a program called path_helper, only accessible with sudo. It looks in two places. The preset system paths are in /etc/paths, which just contains the location of the default bin directories. Nothing in there.

/etc/paths.d/

But there’s a second place path_helper checks for directories to add. Programs can add files to /etc/paths.d, and path_helper will add those to the default path as well. Mine contains four files, for wireshark, mono, tex, and xquartz. Interesting and random, but not useful.

launchctl

While I was googling, I found a few references to launchctl setting $PATH. I assumed that was a runtime configuration of some sort, and I couldn’t remember ever actually setting it. I was reduced to repeatedly reinstalling my terminal, because a fresh install didn’t have the $PATH issues until it loaded 99% of my .bashrc. Seriously, if I commented out the last two lines, it worked, but if I loaded all of it RVM appeared again.

It seemed wildly unlikely that export EDITOR='emacs' was causing the issue, though, so I kept looking and eventually found this unanswered SO question. There is in fact a persistent $PATH set by launchctl, and rvm had ended up in that. You can clear it out with sudo launchctl config user path ''.

Conclusion

There was a happy ending, ctags works now, and I know even more useless information about macs. And so do you!