Environment variables in Mac OS X

Question

Update: The link below does not have a complete answer. Having to set the path or variable in two places (one for GUI and one for shell) is lame.

No

Answer 1

You can read up on linux, which is pretty close to what Mac OS X is. Or you can read up on BSD Unix, which is a little closer. For the most part, the differences between Linux and BSD don't amount to much.

/etc/profile are system environment variables.

~/.profile are user-specific environment variables.

"where should I set my JAVA_HOME variable?"

• Do you have multiple users? Do they care? Would you mess some other user up by changing a /etc/profile?

Generally, I prefer not to mess with system-wide settings even though I'm the only user. I prefer to edit my local settings.