WordNet environment variables

[Sam Kuper]

On 4 March 2012 15:43, Daniel Ericsson <deric at macports.org> wrote:
> On 4 mar 2012, at 16:24, Sam Kuper wrote:
>> Having installed WordNet using "sudo port install wordnet", I'm trying
>> to learn to use it.
>
> This is how I use it from the command-line:
>
> $ wn ashes -over

Yes, that's what I've been doing so far, but I also wanted to
understand the sense index
(http://wordnet.princeton.edu/wordnet/man/senseidx.5WN.html) a bit
better, and to be able to use other libraries to access WordNet.

>> The man page accessed by entering "man wn" at the
>> Terminal refers to the WNHOME and WNSEARCHDIR environment variables.
>> However, neither "echo $WNHOME" nor "echo $WNSEARCHDIR" yields any
>> result.
>
> You shouldn't need to set those (I didn't), but if you do:
>
> WNHOME=/opt/local/share/WordNet-3.0
> WNSEARCHDIR=/opt/local/share/WordNet-3.0/dict

I appreciate that the "wn" command works without these being set, but
other libraries do seem to expect them to be set, so thank you for
confirming what they should be.

In any case, shouldn't MacPorts set them automatically (and,
presumably, also unset them if MacPorts is later used to uninstall
WordNet)?

Sam