A question, before I start to install MacTeX (on OSX 10.8.5):
I have two different acoounts on my Mac: One for admin purposes only, and another one - which has no admin privileges - for the actual work.
As far as I understand, I should install MacTeX using the admin account, but I will be able to use it from the non-admin account (or any other user account on the machine). Is this correct?
MacTeX installs a file in /etc/paths.d, precisely /etc/paths.d/TeX; such a file contains a single line
/usr/texbin
This means that the default PATH environment variable will contain (actually start with) /usr/texbin for all users.
Besides doing this, MacTeX also creates a symbolic link /usr/texbin that points to
../Library/TeX/Distributions/Programs/texbin
This is another symbolic link, which can be managed by the TeX Distribution control panel. This starts to seem complicated (and it is), but to keep things short, this further link points to
/usr/local/texlive/2014/bin/x86_64-darwin
(or universal-darwin, depending on the version of Mac OS X). So the OS is able to find the required binaries when requested to and this holds for every user. Of course, only an Administrator account should run TeX Live Utility for updating the distribution.
Things can go wrong only if users have something in their .profile that directly set the value of PATH, which is however A Bad Thing.
