Installing Android SDK on MAC OS X

Question

I am trying to setup my Mac OS X for development purposes. I have successfully downloaded and setup the iPhone SDK. However, I also need to setup the Android SDK. Coming from a Windows background, there is an instruction that is confusing me. The instruction says:

*In the home directory locate the .bash_profile and locating the PATH variable add the location to your $SDK_ROOT/tools folder.*

From my interpretation, this looks like I'm supposed to add the Android Tools directory to my $PATH. However, I have no idea how to actually do this on Mac OS X. Can anybody please explain this to me? Thank you!

Answer 1

~/.bash_profile usually doesn't exist by default on OS X. You need to edit it with your editor of choice to include:

PATH=$PATH:/<sdk_root>/tools

where <sdk root> is the path defined by $SDK_ROOT.

.bash_profile is, in essence, a shell script that gets run each time you start a new bash session (aka: create a new terminal window or tab, or type bash at any prompt). Accordingly, you can add any little snippets you wish to it, serious things such as environment variables, or goofy stuff like having it output funny ASCII art.