[Xastir] Profile

[Tom Russo]

On Sun, Feb 20, 2005 at 04:13:27PM -0800, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <timbercutter at yahoo.com> flavor, containing:
> I have installed cygwin via the instructions at,
> http://www.lintronix.com/winxastir/ and have started following the
> instructions at,
> http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/*checkout*/xastir/xastir/README.win32?&view=auto
> but I do not understand what it means to find or create a .profile file
> by typeing cd in the bash window. Nothing happens when I type CD. 

"cd" means "change directory" and without an argument it simply brings you 
to your home directory with no messages of any sort --- it looks like it
does nothing, because all it did was change an internal state of the shell.

Once in your home directory, you'd check to see if there exists a file
called ".profile" by using the "ls" command.  Since files with "." at
the beginning are hidden, you have to specify a special option to ls to 
see them: "ls -la" 

Assuming there is no .profile (one is not normally created for you), you 
have to create one with the editor.

> and
> where is the nano editor? 

If you chose to install it when installing cygwin, it would be in /usr/bin or
/usr/local/bin.  If you didn't install it... well, you need to.

> and what does it mean to export PATH=$PATH:/lib:/usr/lib:/usr/X11R6/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/bin?

"export" is the bash command that makes a shell variable available to other 
programs.  PATH is the search path used to locate executable programs, and
its value is a colon-separated list of directory names.  The command
"export PATH=$PATH:/lib:/usr/lib:/usr/X11R6/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/bin"
means, literally, "replace the value of PATH with its original value appended
with the additional string 
':/lib:/usr/lib:/usr/X11R6/lib:/usr/local/lib:/usr/local/bin' and make the 
change visible to other shell processes started from this one."

I don't know why one would add /lib, /usr/lib/, and all those other "lib"
directories to the search path, as it is unusual for executable programs to
live in any of those directories.  One would not normally do that on a 
Unix system, but perhaps there's some oddity on cygwin that makes PATH
be used for finding libraries as well as executables.

HTH,
T.

-- 
Tom Russo    KM5VY     SAR502  DM64ux         http://www.swcp.com/~russo/
Tijeras, NM  QRPL#1592 K2#398  SOC#236 AHTB#1 
 "When life gives you lemons, find someone with a paper cut."