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

It is recommended to check default terminal shell before setting any environment variables, via following commands:

$ echo $SHELL
/bin/zsh

If your default terminal is /bin/zsh (Z Shell) like in my case (Personally prefer Z Shell), then you should set these environment variable in ~/.zshenv file with following contents (In this example, setting JAVA_HOME environment variable, but same applies to others):

export JAVA_HOME="$(/usr/libexec/java_home)"

Similarly, any other terminal type not mentioned above, you should set environment variable in its respective terminal env file.