Help in installing a command line utility.

[simX]

I have this graphing utility called dislin, which is scientific data plotting software. It seems to be pretty nice (and the reason I need is for perl to be able to graph stuff on the web using a VMS machine, and it seems that this might work!).

They have a free BSD version which I wanted to try out, to see if it was what I wanted. So I download it (you can find it at http://www.dislin.de/ ), and go through the read me. I get through most of the installation, but then I get to this in the read me:

f) To make DISLIN available for general use, write the following com-
mands to your .profile or to /etc/profile

DISLIN=directory
export DISLIN
PATH=${PATH}:${DISLIN}/bin

LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$DISLIN:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH

How do I do this with the Terminal on Mac OS X? Before there was a part where I had to set an environment variable, but I was in the wrong shell for these instructions (but I figured out the equivalent of how to do it).

Can anyone tell me how I'm supposed to do this, or with which shell these commands will work?

Thanks for any help.

 

[btoneill]

That would be a prefect time to use sh, ksh, or bash No changes need if you're using the proper shell

Yet another reason why [t]csh is bad


Brian

 

[howardm4]

You can't use it.

The FreeBSD binaries they offer are for
Intel based machines, not PPC plus
the fact that FreeBSD != Darwin

You might want to check out Gnuplot or
perhaps some other graphing s/w that
has been ported to OSX or at least has
source code available.

PS. As the gentleman said, all those
commands assume you are in a 'sh' derived
shell, not a csh derived shell.

 

[simX]

D'oh.

Isn't there a simple way to change the configuration of the binaries to run on a PPC-based FreeBSD system? It seems like it would be trivial, to me.

But whatever...

Where can I get gnuplot? Does it run on VMS? And doesn't work with perl?

EDIT: By the way, does Mac OS X use /etc/profile stuff? What file should I create to use the above commands? I just want to test it even if I probably can't use it.

 

[howardm4]

Ask one of your comp. sci prof's about how
easy it is to do what you want. I would
make an interesting senior project.

gnuplot come from gnu.org and you'd need
the correct Perl module to interface the two.

God knows if it runs on VMS. I can't imagine
it would.

The profile file is what you create, ~/.profile
actually.

It is used by the sh/bash shells