Installing IDL 6.3 on MacOS X
November 4th, 2006 by Marcos
So, maybe this is written somewhere, but it seems like the installation of IDL 6.3 on a Mac isn’t obvious. There’s a nice graphical installer, and the little .app wrappers, but I don’t find those useful. After you have installed things in /Applications/rsi, and you want to run IDL from the command line, there are some important files in /Applications/rsi/idl_6.3/bin that must be used.
Specifically, you want to run /Applications/rsi/idl_6.3/bin/install which will set up symbolic links to idl in /usr/local/bin. Although, on a fresh install of Tiger you won’t have a /usr/local/ or a /usr/local/bin/ and I think the installer chokes. You’ll have to create them if they don’t exist like so:
% sudo mkdir /usr/local
% sudo mkdir /usr/local/bin
Furthermore, you’ll need to have /usr/local/bin/ in your PATH.
Alternatively, you can you put the following line in your .cshrc file
source /Applications/rsi/idl_6.3/bin/idl_setup
Or if you use bash (which is the default shell in OS X) you can put this line in your .profile file in your home directory.
. /Applications/rsi/idl_6.3/bin/idl_setup.bash
Hope this is helpful to various IDL users.
RUDY! Says
This was very helpful. Before I even realized it was you, I was thinking of leaving a comment to express my gratitude, then I looked up and saw “Marcos” and all the “IRAF” links and realized exactly where I was. Kudos!
Dec 4th, 2006 at 10:56 pm