Where is the default terminal $PATH located on Mac?
If you start at /etc/profile, it should look something like this:
if [ -x /usr/libexec/path_helper ]; then
eval `/usr/libexec/path_helper -s`
fi
It's testing to see if the file exists and if so, executes it. If you execute it by hand, you'll get something like this:
PATH="/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin"; export PATH;
I believe that's what you're looking for. So it comes from /etc/profile, which in turn calls an executable that sets the path.
If you do sudo man path_helper
, it talks a bit about how it puts the path together. You might look in /etc/paths
and /etc/paths.d
. I did, and found what I was looking for.
Many system-wide settings including PATH
are set in /etc/profile
which is read in by bash
at startup. On Mac OS X this file usually uses path_helper
to set PATH
. This utility in turn reads the information from other system configuration files under /etc
(see path_helper
manpage).
Note that even if you disable the reading of the initialization files by bash (e.g. with command-line options like --noprofile
) it will still inherit the environment of the parent process.