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Mac OSX Intel (Tiger) install

Kevin McLin wrote on Aug 15, 2006

Hello,

I'm new to this forum and to Macs, but not to IRAF. I've been maintaining IRAF on Debian systems for about ten years. However, I've just gotten a Mac and would like to install onto it. I'm having some problems though.

The machine I have is an iMac running OSX version 10.4.7. I've gone through the typical install procedure, downloading the as, ib and nb archive files and unpacking them into the usual file tree. I did this using the typical unix tar procedure because the Mac OSX installer files I found on the web would not work for me (though they claimed to be "Tiger friendly").

The iraf home user directory is at /Users/iraf, and I'm installing into /Users/iraf/iraf. Everything seems to go well, and the installer script runs without any errors or complaints. But when I try to run mkiraf after the install, I get a cryptic error message:

csh: Illegal variable name

I get this error whether I run the script as the iraf user or in my own user account.

Just for fun I tried to run the cl command without having set up the proper IRAF environment with mkiraf... just to see what happened. I got this message:

/Users/iraf/irafbin.macintel/ecl.e not found
csh: /Users/iraf/irafbin.macintel/ecl.e: Command not found.

This looks like the script might be confused about something regarding the iraf directory structure, but that seems to be exactly what it should be, with

/iraf > /Users/iraf/
$iraf = /Users/iraf/iraf

and with

/Users/iraf/iraf/ main install directory
/Users/iraf/irafbin/ directory with binaries
/Users/iraf/irafbin/bin.macintel directory with ib files
/Users/iraf/irafbin/noao.bin.macintel directory with nb files

I did manage to get IRAF working, at least to the point where it would display images in ds9, but I could not get xgterm working, nor would STSDAS or TABLES work. So I de-installed and started again, so far without any sort of success.

Has anyone had similar issues with an install onto an Intel Mac? Did you solve them? I would love to know how.

Mike Fitzpatrick wrote on Aug 15, 2006

The iraf home user directory is at /Users/iraf, and I'm installing into /Users/iraf/iraf. Everything seems to go well, and the installer script runs without any errors or complaints. But when I try to run mkiraf after the install, I get a cryptic error message:

csh: Illegal variable name


You can trace the script using a command such as

linux% csh -x /iraf/iraf/unix/hlib/mkiraf.csh


This will at least tell you where the script is failing and perhaps why. My guess: you specified your 'imdir' as "HDR$". If so, edit the hlib$mkiraf.csh script by hand to reset this to an absolute path (re-running the install script may similarly fail when it tries to edit the path).

Just for fun I tried to run the cl command without having set up the proper IRAF environment with mkiraf... just to see what happened. I got this message:

/Users/iraf/irafbin.macintel/ecl.e not found
csh: /Users/iraf/irafbin.macintel/ecl.e: Command not found.


Be sure also the $iraf in your environment is specified with a trailing '/'. Assuming the ecl.e was unpacked correctly, the thing to note about the error message is the 'irafbin.macintel" instead of "iraf/bin.macintel".

Cheers,
-Mike

Kevin McLin wrote on Aug 15, 2006

Thanks much. You have nailed the problem with both of your suggestions.

Now to install STSDAS and TABLES.

Last post on Aug 15, 2006