Well I finaly coughed up and put an ssd into my pre historic laptop (well worth the trouble I might add)!
I decided to do things from scratch as opposed to a complete clone of my original HD, mainly because over the years I have probably installed more crud than I care to think about!
This is how to add your local bin folder to your path!
I only use this info about once every 3-4 years but hear it is for my own edumacation and may be, just maybe it will be useful to someone else!
cd ~/ <– switch into your home dir
nano .bash_profile <— create file
then add this line to that file
export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
save close terminal then re launch
Enjoy the contents of you bin!
(you can check that it there by running echo $PATH) or if you have some already executable scripts in your bin you can just try running the scripts from the cli.
Works on Mac os X High Sierra