Setting Path and Envirnoment Variables

I forgot how you are suppose to set path variables and was trying to set them with PATH=$PATH:/directory/to/app but then I remembered I was not using a bash shell. So after a quick search through my books I find this was suppose to work for tcsh or zsh shells:
set path =($PATH /directory/to/app)

Then to set my envirnoment variables I needed to use:
setenv VALUE /directory/to/app

To set the environment variables permanently for system wide users I edited /etc/profile.local with:
export APP_HOME=/directory/to/app

and the path with:
export PATH=$PATH:/directory/to/app

I then logged in and out of KDE and confirmed the envirnoment variables where set.

I found a google search useless because most of the sites I found had the information for bash shells if they had any information at all. I did however find a nice tutorial on the zsh shell.