Re; Unix Newbie

[Ryan Schmidt]

On Feb 11, 2008, at 17:58, Peter Hindrichs wrote:

> Thanks to all for your advise. What I did for now, (until I get  
> some better understanding of Unix) is I followed Ryan Schmidts  
> advise, and used
> $ touch ~/.profile && open -e ~/.profile. That worked out just  
> fine, Do I understand what I did not really, but with time I hope  
> to have a better understanding of what I am doing.

"touch ~/.profile" creates an empty file ~/.profile, or if the file  
~/.profile already exists, it just updates its timestamp.

"open" is a command that opens files into Mac OS X programs. The "-e"  
flag says to open the file into TextEdit.

Type "man touch" and "man open" to get the manual pages to read about  
these commands if you like.

> I now have a working "port" system. I did the selfupdate, my system  
> in now up to date.
> One question if I now look at "env" this is what I get.
>
> Freedom:~ peterhin$ env
> MANPATH=/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11/man
> TERM_PROGRAM=Apple_Terminal
> TERM=xterm-color
> SHELL=/bin/bash
> TMPDIR=/var/folders/Sd/SdnvDsNAHdqx7M41XmVmb++++TI/-Tmp-/
> Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render=/tmp/launch-OeUcxx/Render
> TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION=237
> USER=peterhin
> COMMAND_MODE=unix2003
> SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/launch-FkaAJd/Listeners
> __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x1F5:0:0
> PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/ 
> usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin
> PWD=/Users/peterhin
> LANG=en_CA.UTF-8
> SHLVL=1
> HOME=/Users/peterhin
> LOGNAME=peterhin
> DISPLAY=/tmp/launch-VZvhsj/:0
> SECURITYSESSIONID=b0f090
> _=/usr/bin/env
>
> Do I need to do anything with  MANPATH, as mine does not resemble  
> the example at all.

Per my earlier message, if "man port" works, do nothing to MANPATH.  
(If your MANPATH were empty, and you were running 10.4 or earlier,  
"man port" would just work, so you wouldn't need to mess with  
MANPATH.) If "man port" doesn't work (and it won't work for you,  
because MANPATH is not empty, and does not contain /opt/local/share/ 
man) then add the line from my earlier message which sets MANPATH.

> Also my PATH seems to have extra text do leave this alone, or must  
> I remove it.?

You should probably leave those other items as they are. The PATH  
defines where the system looks for programs when you call them on the  
command line without giving a full path. For example, when you type  
"man port" it looks for a program called "man" in each of the colon- 
separated locations specified in PATH, in order. If you type "which  
man" should see that it finds the "man" program in /usr/bin, one of  
the paths in your PATH.

All your modifications to the PATH for MacPorts should be doing is  
adding /opt/local/bin and /opt/local/sbin to the existing PATH.