Making RStudio respect the $PATH on OS X

Doing the following causes an issue on Catalina with R 4.0.2 ("exec: rm: not found" or "exec: sh: not found" or similar). Delete or rename the .Renviron file to restore functionality. I’m leaving this page up for historical reasons but it may not be necessary in most scenarios anymore. (Updated July 2020)

RStudio does not respect the $PATH environment variable on OS X. However, it will respect a .Renviron file in your home directory. If you run the following:

echo PATH=$PATH > ~/.Renviron

then RStudio will source this file when opening.

You will have to re-run the command if you update your $PATH.

You can check if this is working by running

system("echo $PATH")

Reference: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/31121645/rstudio-shows-a-different-path-variable

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