Re: PSA: Mac OS X El Capitan upgrade might break your $PATH

[Kurtis Rader <krader@skepticism.us>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1920 bytes --]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2015 at 2:05 PM, Andrew Janke <andrew@apjanke.net> wrote:
>
>
> I suspect the order of entries in path_helper is determined by
> alphabetical ordering of the filenames in /etc/paths.d, where path_helper
> locates the files that come after the default system paths. That "40-" in
> XQuartz looks like an rcdir-style technique to enforce ordering, and I
> think the XQuartz folks know what they're doing with the OS X system stuff.
> (This is on 10.9.)
>

That would be fine if it simply appended those directories in that order to
the existing PATH as the man page claims. But it is clearly using a hash
based ordering and ignoring even the apparent ordering implied by the file
names in /etc/paths.d. From my system:

14:45 macbook  coff  ~  ls /etc/paths.d
40-XQuartz go
14:50 macbook  coff  ~  cat /etc/paths.d/*
/opt/X11/bin
/usr/local/go/bin
14:52 macbook  coff  ~  /usr/libexec/path_helper -s
PATH="/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin:/usr/local/go/bin:/Users/krader/bin:/Users/krader/sbin:/Users/krader/symlinks:/usr/local/sbin";
export PATH;
14:52 macbook  coff  ~  echo $PATH
/Users/krader/bin:/Users/krader/sbin:/Users/krader/symlinks:/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/go/bin:/usr/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin:/opt/X11/bin


One other El Capitan change: the system-supplied zsh (5.0.8) appears to be
> compiled with /usr/local/share/zsh/site-functions in the default $fpath,
> which was not the case for earlier versions of OS X. This is probably
> related to the "rootless" stuff that locks down /usr outside /usr/local/.
>

Yes, I noticed that as well and should have mentioned it as it causes zsh
running as root to complain about "compinit: insecure files" since those
files are managed by HomeBrew and owned by me.

Computer Security: If it isn't getting in your way you're doing it wrong :-)

-- 
Kurtis Rader
Caretaker of the exceptional canines Junior and Hank