On 17 oct. 2012, at 23:03, <macruby-devel-request@lists.macosforge.org<mailto:macruby-devel-request@lists.macosforge.org>> wrote: I'm afraid setting the variable again in Xcode is not an option. I was hoping to pick up $CATALINA_HOME to find out where a user had installed tomcat. So where and when is that environment variable set? If you can instruct your user to set it in the global environment, then you should be able to pick it up from any process. The global environment is defined in the file /etc/launchd.conf, and it makes sense for a variable such as CATALINA_HOME to be defined there. Otherwise, best would be to let the tomcat team change their install procedure to either change /etc/launchd.conf, or to call `launchctl setenv CATALINA_HOME /path/to/tomcat` sometime when tomcat launches. Last, you can still parse the configuration file that sets CATALINA_HOME, whether it's ~/.profile, ~/.bash_rc or whatever. Note: user environment used to be defined in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist, but it seems it's not supported any more in Mac OS X 10.8. Regards, Jean-Denis