PATH and exec-path set, but emacs does not find executable

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If you’re setting $PATH inside your Emacs, you might well be on OS X. GUI applications are not started via your shell, so they see different environment variables.

Here’s a trick which I use to ensure the $PATH inside Emacs is the same one I see if I fire up a terminal (but see “update” below):

(defun set-exec-path-from-shell-PATH ()
  "Set up Emacs' `exec-path' and PATH environment variable to match that used by the user's shell.

This is particularly useful under Mac OSX, where GUI apps are not started from a shell."
  (interactive)
  (let ((path-from-shell (replace-regexp-in-string "[ \t\n]*$" "" (shell-command-to-string "$SHELL --login -i -c 'echo $PATH'"))))
    (setenv "PATH" path-from-shell)
    (setq exec-path (split-string path-from-shell path-separator))))

Then simply call the set-exec-path-from-shell-PATH function, perhaps from your Emacs init file. I keep that code on github, BTW.

Update: this code has now been improved and published as an elisp library called exec-path-from-shell; installable packages are available in MELPA.

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