[texhax] /usr/texbin not in path (MacOS)

[Jacob Wegelin]

I downloaded MacTeX.mpkg.zip a couple days ago, unzipped it, and installed it today by clicking on MacTeX-2011.mpkg and accepting all defaults.

Consequently, by the following commands

/usr/texbin/latex

and

/usr/texbin/pdflatex

seem to have no difficulty LaTeXing a small test document. The latter created a good clear pdf file.

But what is the elegant or sensible way to get latex and tex into my unix path?

Details:

MacBook Pro with Mac OS 10.6.8.

Processor: 2.4 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo

Memory: 6 GB 667 MHz DDR2 SDRAm

and currently 304 GB available space on my internal HD.

After installation, TeX Distribution is visible in System Preferences.

/usr/local/texlive is present.

/usr/texbin is present and is a link, as shown below in the unix shell.

~/Documents/LONGTERM/LaTeX/communication> ls -l /usr/texbin

lrwxr-xr-x  1 root  wheel  63 Oct 10 16:36 /usr/texbin@ -> /Library/TeX/Distributions/.DefaultTeX/Contents/Programs/texbin

But /usr/texbin is not in my path:

~/Documents/LONGTERM/LaTeX/communication> echo $PATH
/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/Users/user/bin:/usr/local/bin

Do I have to do this "by hand," i.e., by editing my .bashrc file or
something? Is this not taken care of automatically when I install
MacTeX?

Curiously, I do not find any "set PATH" command in my .bashrc file.

What is the most elegant or smartest way to get the $PATH set?

Thanks for any insights.

Jacob A. Wegelin
Assistant Professor
Department of Biostatistics
Virginia Commonwealth University
830 E. Main St., Seventh Floor
P. O. Box 980032
Richmond VA 23298-0032
U.S.A. 
URL: http://www.people.vcu.edu/~jwegelin