Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Getting things to install for the correct shell in Mac OS X

In addition to blogging about KAUST here, I'm also going to post little useful tidbits related to scientific computing in OS X. Today I was setting up my new Mac Pro. After installing the Enthought Python Distribution, I found that ipython was not in my path (and the python in my path was not the enthought-installed version).

The culprit was the following: I had changed shells in Terminal's preferences to tcsh, but somehow the EPD installer didn't detect this and thought I was still using bash. Thus the modifications to my path were placed in ~/.bash_profile rather than in ~/.cshrc. That was easy enough to fix, but to avoid similar problems in the future, I opened a Terminal and typed

chsh -s /bin/tcsh

so that next time the installer would know my default shell.