[OS X TeX] Leopard MacTeX PATH problems, still

[Richard Koch]

On Mar 22, 2008, at 3:48 PM, David Airey wrote:

> I posted in January about my PATH variable not being set correctly  
> on my Leopard OS X system, following MacTeX installation. The  
> symptoms are programs and scripts other than TeXShop not being able  
> to latex files (like TextMate, which I wanted to try). Currently the  
> PATH variable is:

David,

My apologies that this hasn't been fixed in MacTeX; I hope to repair  
it over spring break.

You can read some details about PATH in MacTeX by reading the link  
"About The Distribution.pdf" in the middle of my home page www.uoregon.edu/~koch 
. This document explains how BasicTeX was made. Read the sections  
"Configuring PATH in Systems 10.3 and 10.4" and "Configuring PATH and  
MANPATH in Leopard".

As you can see from this document, in 10.3 and 10.4 MacTeX modifies / 
etc/csh.login and /etc/profile to add the new path /usr/texbin. But in  
Leopard, these scripts are not modified; instead the new path is added  
by adding a file to /etc/paths.d.

Unfortunately, my understanding of Leopard was incomplete when this  
document was written and MacTeX was constructed. When upgrading Tiger  
to Leopard, Apple modifies /etc/csh.login and /etc/profile to the new  
Leopard versions ONLY IF the previous versions of these scripts were  
not modified by the user. Otherwise Apple adds new versions of these  
scripts with new temporary names, leaving the previous versions  
unmodified and still active.

The easiest fix is to modify your copies of /etc/csh.login and /etc/ 
profile as described in "Configuring PATH in Systems 10.3 and 10.4."  
You will also need to add /usr/local/bin to PATH if you use the  
version of ghostscript in MacTeX.

Dick Koch
koch at math.uoregon.edu