Updating the PATH on the OSX CLI

Whether you use bash, csh, tcsh or zsh (my choice), it's not the most straight forward thing to update your path to search /usr/local/bin/ for scripts before using what's in /usr/bin/. I had some nice .zprofile fu going on to cleanly apply $PATH entries without duplicates, but no matter what ordering I used I would always have my local path appear after the system path.

Turns out OSX has something called /usr/libexec/path_helper the "help" you have a headache.

The solution in the end was to edit /etc/paths and reorder the lines in there to look like this:

$ cat /etc/paths
/usr/local/bin
/usr/bin
/bin
/usr/sbin
/sbin

Now any new shells you open will search /usr/local/bin/ before /usr/bin.