I have repeatedly seen people describe combining Tor and a VPN using the following notation: Tor --> VPN
or VPN --> Tor
or even Tor --> VPN --> Proxy
but then not provide any real-world example of how this is set up.
For example, does Tor --> VPN
mean that I have a VPN client running on my Mac through which all of my traffic is tunnelled, then point Firefox to a locally running instance of Tor thereby all of my Tor traffic is running inside of the VPN tunnel?
Or is it something else entirely? Can somebody please give me a concrete example of each setup?
Edit: I really should've added an example of what I was talking about, I was primarily referring to the examples given in the Tor wiki on the subject.