I'm a beginner so be nice to me

[Scott Haneda]

On Sep 2, 2010, at 7:55 PM, Ryan Schmidt wrote:

> You have the file /usr/local/include/dlfcn.h on your system and it is preventing the help2man port from building properly. Remove this file, and ideally anything else you may have in /usr/local, as files in /usr/local will interfere with MacPorts software. Clean the affected port before trying again. (sudo port clean help2man)

How would files in /usr/local interfere with MacPorts as long as they are not executable files?  And wouldn't /usr/local also further have to be in your PATH?  A .h file, I can't see how that would have any impact on MacPorts while it is building something, as MacPorts tried pretty hard to work in prefix.   I would like to understand this better, but the ticket ( https://trac.macports.org/ticket/12336 ) did not really help me get anywhere.

That ticket did present an interesting command, which I think says to move all files in /usr/local and append a .off to the file name.  If that is the case, that is a very handy command.  Can someone explain how it works?  I just cd'd into a dir and touched about 30 files, but was unable to figure out how to issue the below command on those files to append .off to the filenames.

    Command mentioned in the above ticket:
    sudo mv /usr/local{,.off}

    $mv local/{,.off}
    mv: rename local/ to local/.off: Invalid argument

Thanks 
-- 
Scott (* For off-list contact, replace talklists@ with scott@ *)