PATH Considerations for Shell tasks

Targets macOS
1

Hi Folks,

I’ve finally resolved a problem that was plaguing our customers on 10.10 and 11 with our product and Shell processes. Apparent;y, while Apple has forced developers to place external command line tools into /usr/local/bin, they no longer promote that as part of the system PATH variable. Even though the user may see their path as including /usr/local/bin:

$ echo $PATH
/Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.7/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin_42/bin/:/usr/local/mysql/bin

The PATH passed to the shell for a Xojo project only contains the default system paths of /bin, /usr/bin, /sbin, and /usr/sbin in 10.10 and 10.11 (and 10.12).

To solve this so you’re not having to update to handle the differences between OS X designs, add this code to your App’s Open event:

    Dim origPath As String = System.EnvironmentVariable("PATH")
    System.EnvironmentVariable("PATH") = "/usr/local/bin:" + origPath

Here’s to hoping that might save some of you Shell frustration down the line.

2

is path being set in a login script like .bashrc hence why you see it when logging in to terminal ?

3

It appears that while /usr/local/bin is part of the default path for 10.9 and earlier, it’s not part of it in 10.10+. However, what’s really odd is that none of my test users have a .profile, .bash_profile, or .bashrc file, so they are picking up the modified path from some system setting and that setting is different for users and tasks…

4

Now that is really odd that it would be different per user & task

I haven’t spent time trying to sort out exactly what apple has messed with from 10.9 to 10.10 to 10.11
They just seem to always think that they should change things

5

Sort of like SIP in the first place. Non-Apple system tools have to be placed into /usr/local/bin to reduce the exposure for tool replacements like cp or grep, but then they put /usr/local/bin at the front of the users’ path meaning that if malware puts a cp or grep masquerade app there, it will be run instead of the expected tool …