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

Simplified Explanation

This post/question is kind of old, so I will answer a simplified version for OS X Lion users. By default, OSX Lion does not have any of the following files:

• ~/.bashrc
• ~/.bash_profile
• ~/.profile

At most, if you've done anything in the terminal you might see ~/.bash_history

What It Means

You must create the file to set your default bash commands (commonly in ~/.bashrc). To do this, use any sort of editor, though it's more simple to do it within the terminal:

1. %> emacs .profile
2. [from w/in emacs type:] source ~/.bashrc
3. [from w/in emacs type:] Ctrl + x Ctrl + s (to save the file)
4. [from w/in emacs type:] Ctrl + x Ctrl + c (to close emacs)
5. %> emacs .bashrc
6. [from w/in emacs type/paste all your bash commands, save, and exit]

The next time you quit and reload the terminal, it should load all your bash preferences. For good measure, it's usually a good idea to separate your commands into useful file names. For instance, from within ~/.bashrc, you should have a source ~/.bash_aliases and put all your alias commands in ~/.bash_aliases.