While I personally have never been able to make the configuration files work in the user directory, I’ve had success setting my environment paths in /etc/.profile. However, along with many other components that got shuffled around in the latest release of OSX, those profile settings are no longer found in the same locations. Oh why o why, Apple?

In Leopard, the road to setting environment paths is a rather convoluted one. I wish Apple had made it easier but to date, I haven’t come across any other simpler solution. Here are the few steps that I took to resolve the issue:

1. If you open /etc/.profile in a text editor, you’d see that the Terminal now loads the environment paths via a configuration file in /usr/libexec/path_helper.
2. Opening the path_helper file reveals that environment paths are now collectively stored in a file aptly named paths in the etc directory. Open /etc/paths and you’d see that all the environment paths are neatly listed here. You can simply add your desired paths such as /usr/local/mysql/bin to this list.
3. Relaunch the Terminal and test.

Please note that root user needs to be enabled in order for you to edit the /etc/paths file. To enable the root user, see this article.

Addendum

Good news! Since writing this tutorial I had successfully implemented a .bash_profile file to my shell, effectively rendering the above procedure unnecessary. The secret is in applying the Unix source command which is built into the shell. Create your .bash_profile document at the root of your home directory as follows:

and add any relevant paths that you may need. Then execute source .bash_profile in the command line. This ensures that changes to the environment made in .bash_profile are registered before you restart the shell.