Symbolic Link Issues – Why Does My Symbolic Link Not Work?

symlinkterminal

I wrote a small Julia program:

println("Hello world!")

I can run Julia from the Terminal:

$ /Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin/julia test.jl 
Hello world!

To make my life easier, I tried to create a symbolic link to the julia file.
However, it doesn't seem to work!

$ sudo ln -s /Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia
$ julia
-bash: julia: command not found
$ type -a julia
-bash: type: julia: not found

How do I get my symbolic link to work properly?

What is confusing for me is that /usr/local/bin/ is in my PATH:

$ echo $PATH
/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/Library/TeX/texbin:/opt/X11/bin

Best Answer

I figured out what went wrong: I made a typographical mistake when I was creating the symbolic link!

WRONG

sudo ln -s /Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia

CORRECT

sudo ln -s /Applications/Julia-0.6.app/Contents/Resources/julia/bin/julia /usr/local/bin/julia

(I was missing the julia in .../Resources/julia/bin/...)

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Many programs notify me that “grep/sed/uname/… not found”; some run, some don’t. My system(?) path is damaged, how to go about a diagnosing it

Your question is unclear as it seems to ask several things. However the issue re launching from the Dock can be answered.

The Dock does not call a shell. .profile and other startup scripts are only run when Terminal.app or similar starts a shell or you run a shell script via launchd etc.

To change the path used for Apps launched from the Dock, Finder or other GUI then you need to change the path your Workspace uses this is in ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist e.g. mine is

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
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Also have a look at this question.

MacOS Terminal Commands Not Found – Troubleshooting Guide for Mac OSX

$PATH should contain these folders: /usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/sbin.

Try editing ~/.bash_profile, ~/.profile, or ~/.bash_login (with for example /usr/bin/open ~/.bash_profile -a TextEdit) and commenting out any lines that modify the path.

If that works, you can add a line like export PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:$PATH to ~/.bash_profile.

Best Answer

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Many programs notify me that “grep/sed/uname/… not found”; some run, some don’t. My system(?) path is damaged, how to go about a diagnosing it

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