Thanks for the reply. I must not have the environment syntax right. I was able to set the path by adding in individual path elements like this: /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/opt/comcast/software/groovy/current/bin:/opt/comcast/software/grails/current/bin:/usr/local/git/bin:/usr/X11/bin:/opt/comcast/software/gradle/current/bin But what I wanted to do was to set up some environment variables and include them in the path so as to shorten it: SW_HOME /opt/summitbid/software GROOV_HOME $SW_HOME/groovy/currrent Path …:$GROOVY_HOME:/bin But GROOVY_HOME never resolves to the actual path. From: Perry Smith > Date: Wed, 13 Apr 2011 15:58:47 -0500 To: Edward Young > Cc: "help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org" > Subject: Re: How to make emacs path aware on MacOSX On Apr 13, 2011, at 7:14 AM, Young, Ed wrote: Apologies if this is the wrong forum for this. If so please redirect me. I am running emacs on MacOSX, installed from a DMG file. It works great, but it is not aware of my path, so I can't execute commands like 'git' or 'svn' etc. How can I configure it to be aware of my path. I'm using the global path variable file /etc/profile. The Finder on the Mac (that starts emacs) doesn't look at /etc/profile, etc. For a particular user, it does look at ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist Its a "property list" thing that is normal for Mac settings. You can find it documented more on Mac forums and those kinds of places. e.g. http://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#qa/qa1067/_index.html If you are talking about shells started within emacs, thats a different matter. HTH, pedz