It suddenly struck me what the difference between the systems are :
The two computers
with the problems have SSDs and Apple_APFS
without any issues have "Spinning Rust" and Apple_HFS
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Bjarne D Mathiesen
Korsør ; Danmark ; Europa
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I'm having problems with /usr/libexec/path_helper on some of my machines
& I've been completely unable to discover what it is that's going wrong :-(
Now, as part of my install process of MacPorts I'm doing this :
# setup the system paths
('paths')
mkdir -p /etc/paths.d