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

Adding Path Variables to OS X Lion

This was pretty straight forward and worked for me, in terminal:

$echo "export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/whatever" >> .bash_profile #replace "/path/to/whatever" with the location of what you want to add to your bash profile, i.e: $ echo "export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/Cellar/nginx/1.0.12/sbin" >> .bash_profile 
$. .bash_profile #restart your bash shell

A similar response was here: http://www.mac-forums.com/forums/os-x-operating-system/255324-problems-setting-path-variable-lion.html#post1317516