osxutils

[Richard L. Hamilton]

Recently updated from Lion to Mavericks; updated most of my stuff, a few didn't work, and mostly weren't anything I cared about; since I did that in part to also update BootCamp so I could use update my Windows partition from 8 to 8.1, on top of having all the other apps and stuff that needed updating for 10.9, I had a very full day when I did that.  I think I kept notes, so if anyone is interested, I could dig up the ones that didn't build, although I suspect most are probably known by now.

Probably unrelated however, I ran across a case where I wanted some of the osxutils commands (mkalias in particular).  I'd had an old non-packaged build of them, but they were ppc, so they must've become useless when Rosetta went away on my older system.  Haven't wanted them often apparently, but very much so when I did. :-)

Naturally I tried the MacPorts port, but it didn't work.  But some googling found me that someone else has been keeping them up-to-date enough that theirs still builds on 10.9.2!  I have no idea if it builds on versions as far back as you want to support, though.

https://github.com/vasi/osxutils

Being impatient, rather than fiddle with git, I just grabbed the zip file, did

cd ~/Downloads/osxutils-master # zip file was automatically unzipped on download
make

and it all built.

I suppose depending on whether it will build on the earliest OS X version MacPorts intends to support, it might either be possible to adopt this version in its entirety, or else merge it in such a way (#ifdef's?) as to work on all versions.  I have neither the time nor the experience with Mac-specific software building quirks to pursue that myself, but for whoever (if anyone is maintaining the MacPorts port of osxutils, I thought they might find this interesting.