[TxMt] Re: Textmate Ruby Error

[Allan Odgaard]

On 3 Oct 2009, at 20:53, snowmaninthesun wrote:

> Yep, thats exactly the case!! How can i set textmate to auto use my  
> path
> variable instead, when i tried just deleting that variable, my tests  
> no
> longer run.

Well… a process has a bunch of variables, these are inherited by each  
child process spawned.

PATH is one of these variables, and the “root” process will give it  
some sane value like: /bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin — so all  
processes will inherit that, but each process is of course free to  
overwrite it.

You can overwrite it for the first process spawned when you login to  
your account via the ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist file. These values  
will thus be used by all successive processes spawned.

One process where PATH is used is the shell (bash) which normally is  
launched by Terminal, so by default bash would use the value you set  
in environment.plist but you can overwrite it in /etc/profile or any  
of the dozen other startup files that the shell execute.

Another process where PATH is used is TextMate, which again inherits  
from environment.plist but allows you to overwrite values via  
Preferences → Advanced. From TextMate you can run commands via a  
shell interpreter, so here PATH can again be overwritten by /etc/ 
profile and similar, but far from all commands go via a shell  
interpreter.

In light of that, the question of “how to auto-set PATH” makes less  
sense. I think what you maybe wanted to ask “how to only set PATH  
once?”. In that case, the most appropriate would be  
environment.plist, but you have to make sure that no shell startup  
file overwrites the variable (the default /etc/profile used to do  
that, but I don’t think it does anymore). The tedious thing about  
environment.plist though is that for the changes to be effective, the  
root process needs to be relaunched (that is, you need to logout of  
your account and login again).