[alanscott]

Anyone know of a way to set the environment variable of an application launched out of the finder or dock?

I try to set them in .tcshrc or .login or .profile, but that only seems to affect shells inside Terminal or xterms.

I know on linux, I can set variables in .xsession or in .gnome/session. Is there an analagous system for setting session-level environment variables in the Mac UI?

-- alan

[clarkgoble]

Most native OSX applications don't use environment variables. Their settings are stored in plists typically in your preference directory (~/Library/preferences).

The only native OSX apps that use environment variables are ones that interact with traditional Unix software like mySQL.

[samthecat]

you can make an environment.plist file and put it in a directory called .MacOSX in your home directory. a quick search at apple developer came up with technical Q&A

there is more info there, and in the discussions at apple.

cheers

[alanscott]

Sam, thanks for the info. It looks like that will do exactly what I want. :-)

-- alan

P.S., the app that I am trying to pass the environment variable is the OSX port of GNU Emacs, which derives certain aspects of its config from environment variables, even though that isn't the way most native OSX apps behave.