[OS X TeX] MacTeX installation

[David Watson]

On Jan 24, 2008, at 11:35 PM, Bill Northcott wrote:

> On 25/01/2008, at 7:00 AM, David Airey wrote:
>> The reason I ask is because some R scripts also told me I don't  
>> have a
>> working TeX installation or that my PATH is not set appropriately. So
>> I'm wondering if Gerben Wierda's scripts failed?
>> I'm using Leopard 10.5.1.
>
> To which Dick Koch replied
>>
>> You can easily test this. Open Terminal in /Applications/Utilities.  
>> Type
>>
>> 	echo $PATH
>
> This horribly misleading.  I see so many people confused about PATH  
> and other environment variables in MacOS.
>
> R is usually started as the R gui app double clicked in the Finder  
> or clicked in the dock.  Dick Koch's instructions will show you the  
> PATH in a shell.  This is what the Tex installers modify.
>
> To see the PATH within the R gui app use 'Sys.getenv("PATH")'   If  
> you try both, you will see they are not the same.
>
> Unlike most UNIX flavours, most processes on MacOS are not launched  
> from a shell and so do not have the environment of a shell.  If you  
> need specific environment in R set it up in an R script with  
> Sys.putenv().
>
> Bill Northcott
>

This is also misleading, as one may open R.app into the GUI from the  
Terminal in such a way that the environment {\em is} transferred:
   open -a R