Where to Place $Path Variable Assertions in Zsh?
I Love Zsh, but I Am Not Sure Where to Place My $Path and Other Variable Assertions? I Find That They Are Scattered Between the Files. Zshrc. Zprofile. Bashrc...
I love zsh, but I am not sure where to place my $PATH and other variable assertions? I find that they are scattered between the files .zshrc .zprofile .bashrc .bash_profile, and sometimes doubled.
I realize that having anything inside the bash files doesn't make much sense seeing as I'm using zsh, but where exactly should I be placing my rvm, python, node etc additions to my $PATH?
Is there a specific file I should be using (i.e. .zshenv which does not currently exist in my installation), one of the ones I am currently using, or does it even matter?
3 Answers
tl;dr version: use ~/.zshrc
And read the man page to understand the differences between:
~/.zshrc,~/.zshenvand~/.zprofile.
Regarding my comment
In my comment attached to the answer kev gave, I said:
This seems to be incorrect - /etc/profile isn't listed in any zsh documentation I can find.
This turns out to be partially incorrect: /etc/profile may be sourced by zsh. However, this only occurs if zsh is "invoked as sh or ksh"; in these compatibility modes:
The usual zsh startup/shutdown scripts are not executed. Login shells source /etc/profile followed by $HOME/.profile. If the ENV environment variable is set on invocation, $ENV is sourced after the profile scripts. The value of ENV is subjected to parameter expansion, command substitution, and arithmetic expansion before being interpreted as a pathname. [man zshall, "Compatibility"].
The ArchWiki ZSH link says:
At login, Zsh sources the following files in this order:
/etc/profile
This file is sourced by all Bourne-compatible shells upon login
This implys that /etc/profile is always read by zsh at login - I haven't got any experience with the Arch Linux project; the wiki may be correct for that distribution, but it is not generally correct. The information is incorrect compared to the zsh manual pages, and doesn't seem to apply to zsh on OS X (paths in $PATH set in /etc/profile do not make it to my zsh sessions).
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