Re: ExifTool installation - PATH
Re: ExifTool installation - PATH
- Subject: Re: ExifTool installation - PATH
- From: Sander Tekelenburg <email@hidden>
- Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2005 19:16:46 +0200
At 10:55 -0500 UTC, on 2005/06/19, Irwin Poche wrote:
> I'm trying to install a perl tool, ExifTool. It will give me Applescript
>access to exif information iPhoto does not provide.
>
> I know next to nothing about perl. The installation says...
>
> You can install ExifTool manually by moving 'exiftool' and
> the 'lib' directory to any directory in your current PATH.
>
> Can anyone tell me how to get the PATH directories ?
PATH is a shell variable, containing a list (well, technically it's a string)
of paths to directories in which you want the shell to be able to find
binaries. This is so in the shell you can type the name of a program to
execute it, without having to provide the full path to the program. So,
simply put, it is for convenience only.
To see what is in your current PATH, in Terminal.app type "echo $PATH"
(without the quotes) and hit return.
You could then place the files in any of the directories in your PATH (don't
forget to consider the binary's permissions). But you don't have to and may
not want to:
Each user can change their PATH in their shell's configuration file. Exactly
how depends on the shell you use. SInce Panther the default shell is bash -
its local configuration file can be ~/.bashrc and ~/.bash_profile (they're
text files which you just create if they don't exist yet). The difference has
something to do with interactive vs non-interactive shells. If you need to
know, read man bash. I use .bash_profile. The syntax would be:
PATH=/full/path:/other/full/path:/yet/another/full/path
[Note that you'll need to start a new shell to see your changes - force the
shell to read its configuration file again.]
I believe a good location for your binaries would be /usr/local/bin. You
could also just dump it in /bin, but there may be a risk that Apple's system
installers/updaters will one day overwrite it there. My impression is that
/usr/local/bin is safer in that sense.
There are several conventions that tell which path would make sense, but in
the end you are free t do what you want. AFAIK you could create /myapps if
you want, and add it to your PATH and have it work just fine. This could be a
nice way to keep clear which of all that 'unix stuff' is original, and which
is yours.
HTH
--
Sander Tekelenburg, <http://www.euronet.nl/~tekelenb/>
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