OS X (Apple)

Hi:

So my current Python (2.52) rig is not working as intended. "echo $PATH" in bash gives me 'X'" that's not what i want, so i need to change my path. To do that, there appeared to be four choices (all in my ~/ directory--note: I'm root, it's my Mac, but i'm in a user account):
.profile
.bashrc
.bash_profile
.bash_login

I inserted (unique) dummy paths in each of these, sourced them, keyed in "echo $PATH" again--nothing changed. Apparently none of these files are sourced by bash on login. I looked for a similar file in root (/env) but found nothing.
Finally, i'm aware that OS X uses the .plist to set environment variables--fine, but mine is empty (as i thought it would be) so that's not the culprit.
This is a painfully basic question that i was pretty sure i knew, but didn't. Any ideas?

Thanks,

--alex

This might not be exactly the answer you were looking for, but put this in your .bash_profile

#path info
export PATH="$PATH:/your/test/path/here"

Quit the Terminal application (not just closing the window), and relaunch the terminal.
You $PATH should reflect the change.

zsh is my preferred shell on all Unixes. I use Xterm with zsh in XQuarts on Mac OS X. I had issues with setting PATH when I switched shells as well. I changed the PATH variable in my .profile and added this "source ~/.profile" to my zshrc. It works rather well, and I believe .profile is shell-independent, so if other programs try to access it, then they can. I use the same workaround for screen, as well.