The penny finally dropped
I think you didn't realize just how far gone I was.
Anyway, you don't need to set path in the mac world. Your java programs can reside in the home directory. When you start up your mac, look at the finder, and you have a home directory under your user name. (I was looking for the
string literal usr, where in the case of my computer, usr is Midori. You do your text edit, and save the file to the home folder.
Of course, the next neat thing is, you can move around the folder tree in terminal. If you want to put your java programs in a JavaFolder in your documents folder, that works, but when you sign on to terminal, and you want to play with them, then you have to go cd documents cd JavaFolder to find them the next time you start up the terminal.
Anyway, I found the programs, they ran. Cool.