I’ve been using Unix, Linux and the variants for a very long time.  My first version of installed Linux was 0.91-something.  I even had Coherent installed at one point in the late 80′s.  I’ve worked and played with most variants of *nix, including *Aix, Xenix, SCO, HPUX, Redhat, Ubuntu, CentOS, and several others that I just can’t think of off the top of my head.

Point being that my familiarity made me an early-adopter of the Mac OS when it was announced that they would begin building on BSD Unix.  Up until that time, I was pretty much a “Mac is for Graphics-Dudez” kind of programmer.  Besides, this being the late 80′s through the late 1990′s, I really couldn’t afford one.

See, the thing about Unix-based systems, for you non-Geeks, is that (a) they work, (b) they work really well, and (c) except for the occasional Redhat distribution, you can pretty much find all the files you’re used to finding in the places that you’re used to looking for.  In other words, if I want to change my terminal login message, I know to edit the file: /etc/issue and I can change the login message to something really snarky.

But, as I said earlier, Max OS X is based on that there left-handed Unix coming out of Berkeley … so not everything is in the places that you’d expect.  In this quick article, I’m going to share what I learned today about setting up your PATH environment variable for your default shell.