How can one use /etc/paths.d to add a path with spaces in it to $PATH?

My /etc/paths.d/com.vmware.fusion.public contains:

 /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public

In Terminal, echo $PATH outputs:

/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public

I have no problem with my PATH or executing e.g. vmrun, which is in the /Applications/VMware Fusion.app/Contents/Public directory, so having the space is not an issue. Your PATH is being messed up elsewhere!

Have you modified /etc/paths or have you added a ~/.bash_profile or ~/.profile, and if so are you modifying the PATHin any of these files?

So I'll try and give this one the ol college attempt. So after messing around with this for about an hour I came to the conclusion that path_helper - the native app that constructs a PATH environment variable from /etc/paths and /etc/paths.d doesn't play well with paths that have spaces in them, ie. thus why you're experiencing your current situation.

So my hacky solution to get this working, is to create a symlink from,

/Applications/VMware Fusion.app

to

/Applications/VMwareFusion.app

using the below command,

ln -sf /Applications/Vmware Fusion.app /Applications/VmwareFusion.app

Then edit /etc/paths.d/com.vmware.fusion.public and change the one line in that file to look like the below,

/Applications/VMwareFusion.app/Contents/Public/

Then obviously start a new shell session or reinit.

This solution works great for me using the fish shell.