Using updated GCC?

You don't want to try and change to a non-apple supplied GCC. They patch it to support their various extensions for OSX. You can use your new gcc to build your posix apps, but if you try and replace your dev tools with it you'll have problems.

If you want to use it yourself from the command line by default, you should put /usr/local/bin in your path ahead of /usr/bin and /bin. Because Apple sucks, I had to add the following line to my ~/.bash_profile:

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

(This is assuming you installed gcc-4.3.2 to /usr/local/bin which you should have done.)

 

Most BSD systems require that as they will only search system paths by default.

 

Actually /usr/libexec/path_helper hard codes in the system paths and doesn't let you change their order. So adding /usr/local/bin to the paths won't work because defaults always go first. System level scripts should use absolute paths anyway. For the rest of what you do, you should be able to "replace" your system files by putting new versions or whatever in /usr/local and your own scripts will use those instead.

brent1a, you can use any text editor or anything to edit your .bash_profile file in your home directory. You will need to use the terminal, however, in order to edit it. You can make it easy on yourself by typing this in terminal:

open -a TextEdit ~/.bash_profile