I’ve resisted doing this for years because, should there be an error, or even a misconfiguration, the user wouldn’t know about it.

In any case, nice work - but you should mention and link to Hivelogic correctly - there is no capital L in Hivelogic.

That’s a valid point, but, say there is an error somewhere along the way, and that section fails. Will your script stop and let you know, or will it continue? If you’ve walked away, will you see that something has failed later, without testing?

And say you fix the part that did fail … won’t you have to re-run through the script again, just to get to the part that has failed?

In any case, all I’m saying is, there are potential problems when trying to write a script that will work for all users in every situation.

Many people, perhaps a dozen or so, have written scripts like this and sent them to me, and I’m certainly not discouraging you to do so. The opposite is true - I’d love to see an intelligent, error-detecting script that could make this whole process easier. Just keep in mind that there may be some pitfalls, and that I didn’t offer a script publicly because, over the years, I haven’t been able to ensure that it will “just work” the way a script on a Mac should!

This is great, thanks for posting this!

I have one question though, after running this script, and verifying that readline and ruby appeared to install correctly, the version of ruby on my machine still states 1.8.2, not 1.8.6 (ruby -v). Is this normal? Is there a different way to confirm which ruby version is installed.

One thing I noticed when the make install was completed for readline, the last line stated, if this is any clue:

install: you may need to run ldconfig

Thanks again!

Ok, so I did add the “/usr/local/bin” to the PATH in my system init profile in /etc, see below, but it still comes up with the
Ruby version 1.8.2. I restarted my computer, as well. What am I doing wrong?

# System-wide .profile for sh(1)

PATH="/bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:usr/local/bin"
export PATH

if [ "${BASH-no}" != "no" ]; then
	[ -r /etc/bashrc ] && . /etc/bashrc
fi

You’re right! But I just went to the /usr/ocal/bin directory where the ruby command exists, and ran the same “ruby -v” command and it was still listed as 1.8.2. Do I need to be logged in as root in order for this to work? Does it matter the version of XCode, I’m using 2.2?

Chuck,

You have a PATH problem, if you check the hivelogic article, you will see a section on paths.

The system looks for where to search for executables based on the order of the $PATH variable.
In your example above the system will look in /usr/local/bin last. So it would find the ruby that came with OS X in /usr/bin first.
This is why you always got the old version information anytime you ran “ruby -v”.

The hivelogic article section on paths can help you fix this.

Hope this helps.