macOS – How to Inspect Environment Variables of a Running Process

Apps launched from the dock or desktop or any GUI do not use bash. They are all children of the workspace (the loginwindow process).

To set the environment variables you need to edit ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist which is read when you login. This is a text plist and you need to set a key element to the name of the environment variable it uses and the next string element to its value. See Apple's documentation for Setting environment variables for user processes

e.g. mine is for WAFDIR and PATH

<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
  <key>WAFDIR</key>
  <string>/Users/mark/src/third_party/git-svn/waf</string>

  <key>PATH</key>
  <string>/Users/mark/bin:/Users/mark/env/bin:/Users/mark/usr/local/bin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/local/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/bin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/usr/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin:/usr/libexec/binutils:</string>
</dict>
</plist>

The system-wide default path is in /etc/paths. The default on a 10.8 system contains the following:

/usr/bin

/bin

/usr/sbin

/sbin

/usr/local/bin

To add additional system-wide PATH entries, you could change that file, but a better option would be to add a file with the additional path entries to directory /etc/paths.d. That user-created file will be protected during any upgrades/patches, which may replace a customised /etc/paths with an Apple-distributed version.

Alternatively, you could put the appropriate PATH modifying statements in /etc/profile or /etc/bashrc (in the case of bash, it will only use the latter if the former doesn't exist). Any other system-wide environment changes can be done using those files as well.

User-specific configuration can be put in $HOME/.bashrc or $HOME/.bash_profile.

Note: In the above, I've assumed you're using bash - if you're using csh or zsh, you'll need to adjust their configuration files (the information about /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d remains valid, however).