How to edit the hosts file in Mac OS X – Leopard

Introduction

The hosts file is a text file that maps hostnames to IP addresses.
Upon typing a url address on the browser, the system is checking if there is a relevant entry on the hosts file and gets the corresponding IP address, else it resolves the IP via the active connection’s DNS servers.

The hosts file can be edited to block certain hostnames (like ad-serving/malicious hosts), or used for web development purposes, i.e. to redirect domains to local addresses.

Editing the hosts file

Editing the hosts file in Mac OS X – Leopard, is a pretty easy task, especially if you are familiar with the terminal.

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OS X: Change your PATH environment variable

To change your path, you must edit the .profile file in your home directory. If you are comfortable using the vi editor, you probably don’t need to read any further. If not, then you can use TextEdit to edit your .profile.

The default .profile is fairly short. The .profile is read when you open a Terminal window and each line is executed just like typing a command into the Terminal window. While this is handy because you can make any available command run whenever you drop to a shell, we’re concerned with changing an environment variable, PATH.
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