Upgraded to Leopard : Making use of /etc/paths.d and path_helper

24 Jan 2008

In Leopard, Apple has introduced a new mechanism for managing and maintaining your system path ($PATH).

Previously (and in most current Linux environments) paths were managed by updating the PATH environment variable directly in either the system profile (/etc/profile) or your local profile (~/.bash_profile).

Commonly you had entries like:

export JAVAHOME = /usr/lib/j2se/jdk1.5.013/
  export PATH=$PATH:$JAVA_HOME/bin
  ...

In Leopard, you no longer have to modify the profile to make adjustments to system paths. Instead, you can put a simple text file containing a path entry (or entries) into /etc/paths.d/.

Each line in this file will be interpreted as a path and added automatically to the system path.

macos-gls000120:~ ajordens$ ls -al /etc/paths.d/
total 40
drwxr-xr-x    7 root  wheel   238 Jan 22 18:51 .
drwxr-xr-x  105 root  wheel  3570 Jan 23 11:59 ..
-rw-r--r--    1 root  wheel    13 Sep 23 20:53 X11
-rw-r--r--    1 root  wheel    16 Jan 22 18:58 groovy
-rw-r--r--    1 root  wheel    15 Jan 22 18:58 maven
-rw-r--r--    1 root  wheel    20 Jan 22 18:58 postgresql
-rw-r--r--    1 root  wheel    15 Jan 22 18:58 scala

macos-gls000120:~ ajordens$ cat /etc/paths.d/scala $SCALA_HOME/bin

It’s up to you whether you include an environment variable or specify the full path.

Enter Leopard

In order to take advantage of this new feature, your /etc/profile needs to invoke /usr/libexec/path_helper. Depending on your upgrade path to Leopard, your profile may or may not have been automatically updated.

Unfortunately mine wasn’t and I couldn’t find a definitive post telling what changes I had to make to the profile. I decided to write the procedure up so that anyone else wanting to take advantage of paths.d and path_helper could do so.

macos-gls000120:~ ajordens$ cat /etc/profile


System-wide .profile for sh(1)

if [ "${BASH-no}" != "no" ]; then [ -r /etc/bashrc ] && . /etc/bashrc fi

export ANT_OPTS="-Xmx256M"

export POSTGRESQLHOME="/opt/local/lib/postgresql82" export CONFBASE=/usr/local/src/confluence-2.6.2 export HADOOPHOME=/usr/local/src/hadoop-0.15.2

export GROOVYHOME=/usr/local/src/groovy-1.5.1 export SCALAHOME=/usr/local/src/scala-2.6.0-final export MAVEN_HOME=/usr/local/src/maven-2.0.7

export JAVA_HOME="/System/Library/Frameworks/JavaVM.framework/Versions/1.5.0/Home/"

if [ -x /usr/libexec/pathhelper ]; then eval `/usr/libexec/pathhelper -s` fi

That’s basically it. I put the path_helper invocation at the end of the profile because I wanted to be able to substitute environment variables.