On Fri, 21 Nov 2014, Berend Hasselman wrote:
If I want to execute the commandline gretl on OS X will this
suffice (in a terminal of course)?
/Applications/Gretl.app/Contents/Resources/bin/gretlcli <any options>
Good question, and sorry I haven't got to it sooner.
The answer is basically yes, but there are some finer points that
need attention if we're serious about supporting gretlcli on the
Mac.
Yes: the invocation above should start gretlcli OK, and most things
should work, provided the GUI program has been run beforehand and
therefore a valid ~/.gretl2rc file has been created in the user's
home directory.
Finer points: one of these is that invoking gnuplot via gretlcli is
unlikely to work. That's because the gnuplot executable that's
supplied in the gretl package will probably not be in the user's
PATH. (It should work OK with the GUI, because the GUI program is
launched via a script that sets up all the requisite environment
variable magic.)
Maybe we should move the real gretlcli binary to, say, gretlcli.bin
and install a script named gretlcli which calls gretlcli.bin with
the relevant environment variables set appropriately. We haven't
paid much attention to this so far, on the assumption that 99 point
something percent of Mac users will never have any occasion to use
the CLI program. But we should also consider the "one percent"!
(And I guess we could say the same goes for Windows -- although in
that case the CLI is even less likely to be used since there is by
default no half-way usable shell on Windows, while the Mac has a
pretty decent terminal program that runs bash, even if nobody but
l33t haxors knows about it.)
Allin Cottrell