I recently upgraded from Kubuntu 12.04 (LTS) to 13.04 (using KDE 4.10.4).

Before the upgrade, krunner launched via Alt+F2 would respect a custom $PATH set in .bashrc, but this seems to work differently now.

In my .bashrc, I adjust the $PATH to include /home/username/bin. This works as expected in a terminal, but not when I try to run something from ~/bin after pressing Alt+F2. A little testing suggests that KDE isn't reading any .bash* config files at startup (anymore?).

Has this behavior been changed?
And how do I get krunner to see my custom $PATH now?

When I start krunner from konsole, the paths work like they used to, probably because krunner inherits the environment from bash.

It is not likely KDE which has changed in this case, but the shell interpreter which runs the initial KDE startup phase.
To fix this, you could put an executable *.sh file in $KDEHOME/env/ which sources the necessary files.

If not defined, you can determine KDEHOME by running "kde4-config --localprefix".
It is usually ~/.kde4/ or ~/.kde/

Thank you, that worked.

For the record, I found out the hard way that I can't just set $PATH to anything I want, like I do for interactive shells.
When I tried that, KDE couldn't find its own components anymore (I think).
The error showed up as an xmessage: "Could not start D-Bus. Can you call qdbus?".
So, instead of hard-coding the $PATH from scratch, use `export PATH=$PATH:/my/own:/paths`.

Yes, KDE requires that it's own installation prefix (and several of it's other dependencies) is included in PATH. Particular dependencies which need to be included are shared-mime-database, dbus and Qt.

after upgrade often any problem.
usually reinstall again.

put a .sh file with the necessary paths in ~/.kde/env.