CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macos
Bruce Hobbs
Bruce Hobbs

Reputation: 116

On Mac OS X 10.5 what determines PATH value before /etc/profile?

While investigating the process described on the path_helper man page I was surprised to find that the value of PATH upon entry to /etc/profile seems to have already been customized per user. I can't seem to find anything documenting this behavior. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 459

Answers (1)

ennuikiller
ennuikiller

Reputation: 46965

Taken from Apple documentation:

On login, the loginwindow application looks for a special property list file with the name environment.plist. This file must be located in a directory called .MacOSX at the root of the user’s home directory. The path to this file is as follows:

~/.MacOSX/environment.plist

If an environment.plist file exists, loginwindow looks for keys that are children of the root element. For each of these keys, loginwindow registers an environment variable of the same name and assigns it the value of the key

Upvotes: 2

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