How to add /usr/local/bin in $PATH on Mac
The PATH
variable holds a list of directories separated by colons, so if you want to add more than one directory, just put a colon between them:
export PATH=$PATH:/usr/local/git/bin:/usr/local/bin
That syntax works in any Bourne-compatible shell (sh, ksh, bash, zsh...). But zsh, which is the default shell in recent versions of MacOS, also exposes the PATH another way - as a variable named (lowercase) $path
, which is an array instead of a single string. So you can do this instead:
path+=(/usr/local/git/bin /usr/local/bin)
In either case, you may want to check to make sure the directory isn't already in the PATH before adding it. Here's what that looks like using the generic syntax:
for dir in /usr/local/git/bin /usr/local/bin; do
case "$PATH" in
$dir:*|*:$dir:*|*:$dir) :;; # already there, do nothing
*) PATH=$PATH:$dir # otherwise add it
esac
done
And here's a zsh-specific version:
for dir in /usr/local/git/bin /usr/local/bin; do
if (( ${path[(i)$dir]} > $#path )); then
path+=($dir)
fi
done
But in Zsh you can also just mark the array vars as accepting only unique entries:
typeset -TU PATH path
and even make your own pathlike variables mirrored in arrays:
typeset -TU PYTHONPATH pythonpath
Try placing $PATH at the end.
export PATH=/usr/local/git/bin:/usr/local/bin:$PATH