Greetings!

[Timothy R. Simmons]

I have a (hopefully) simple question, so please forgive my ignorance. 
But heck, we all have to start somewhere.
Okay, I've been using FreeBSD for about a month now, and am tinkeringly 
famliar with C and C++ coding, which is to say, I usetacould. Anyway, 
I've been installing some programs designed primarily for linux systems, 
which seem to use an ld.so.conf file in /etc to point to libraries, 
which updates, I'm guessing, LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable. 
Neither of these seem to exist in the BSD world, so here's my question. 
How do I update the path where libraries and header files are searched 
for? BSD seems to like to put things in /usr/lib, /usr/bin, etc.. where 
as the programs I'm installing are placing these files, by default, in 
/usr/local/lib, /usr/local/bin, etc., which isn't IN my path for lib and 
bin files. I can see where it sets the path on boot, but can't manage to 
figure out how to change it. Any help would be appreciated.

- Tim