Question

I just started reading Michael Hartl’s book on Rails and I’ve run across a problem in the setup phase. Hartl keeps referring to making a file in my home directory, but I’m not quite sure how to do this. For example, when I try to setup the command line for sublime text the instructions tell me to do this: Assuming you’ve placed Sublime Text 2 in the Applications folder, and that you have a ~/bin directory in your path, you can run:

ln -s “/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl” ~/bin/subl

My problem is that I don’t know how to put a ~/bin directory in my path. I know this is real basic but any help would be greatly appreciation.

Answer 1

create or edit ~/.profile (works with both bash and zsh)

add the following

export PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin

The line above is saying, overwrite the PATH environment variable and set it to the previous path plus ~/bin

Now when you try to run a command, bash will look in all the colon separated paths in your PATH environment variable for an executable.

To see your entire PATH, type echo $PATH in a terminal. Or better yet, type env to see all environment variables.