Forwarding Address: OS X

Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Quick calculator revisited: installing calc.pl

Way back last Thursday I wrote about wanting a decent calculator from the command line in Quick Calculator. In the comments anonymous pointed out that there's a perl-based calculator available out there called the Astronomy-aware Unix calculator (don't let the name scare you) and I gotta say: it kicks some serious ass.

I was going to just post about its existence here, with the assumption that everyone would know how to install it but then I remembered a post awhile ago in which some reader comments mentioned that they'd like less geek-heavy content, which I took to mean: "more content presented in a way that didn't assume every reader spends their whole day writing code and compiling their own applications from source".

So instead I've written a complete installation guide for calc, which assumes, step-by-step, that the reader is new to the Terminal and command line. If you're already a command line user this probably won't be anything new to you; if you're not but you're curious about it and you want to explore another level of your Mac then this might be the starting point you need to bite through the crunchy Aqua shell and into the chewy command-line centre of OS X: Installing calc.pl under OS X.

posted by Chris at 7:56 AM

6 Comments:

  • You are a nice man.

    By Blogger pbx, at 8:52 AM  

  • Very nice. You might want to look into what happens for people who use bash, since this is the default shell now. I think the file to put the alias in is now called .bashrc.

    You might also want to use option+click on the download link. This will download the file immediately in just about every mac browser.

    Harold (aka Anonymous).

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 11:57 AM  

  • Good idea about bash. Question: how can a user find out easily which shell they're in?

    As for Opt-click it was that originally but I didn't want a reader to download and not know where the file went. Readers who already know that will use Option and those who don't will know explicitly where the file was saved to.

    By Blogger Chris, at 12:14 PM  

  • Well, you could try 'echo $SHELL' but the easiest way would proably to look at the prompt. In bash it's 'sh-2.05b$' while in tcsh it's something like '[angua:~] harold%'. So bash uses a dollarsign and tcsh uses a percentsign and includes your name and the name of your computer.

    Harold.

    By Anonymous Anonymous, at 2:37 AM  

  • Thanks Harold, as soon as I get a few freee minutes I'll update it.

    By Blogger Chris, at 8:46 AM  

  • Thanks for this calculator.Its very useful.Iwant the unlock code calculator?Where can i get? can u tell?I got the unlocking informations from the site mobileunlockguide
    Where can i get the unlock code?

    By Blogger ranjit, at 10:58 PM  

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