Right now, it's such a mess. Every time I install a new program that does something trivial in the command line, I have to add it to the path. In fact, I'm developing on Ruby and even gems (plugins/extensions) sometimes have their own executables, and are stored in different folders and I end up having to add several paths per application, as well. It's gotten to the point that I am pushing thirty paths in my PATH environment variable.
I'm cautious to copying and pasting them to a home folder of sorts and setting path to that; it just feels wrong. Is there an established best practice that I am missing?