Re: [Gretl-users] Running gretlcli on Mac OS X

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"!