On Feb 11, 2008, at 17:58, Peter Hindrichs wrote:

Thanks to all for your advise. What I did for now, (until I get some better understanding of Unix) is I followed Ryan Schmidts advise, and used $ touch ~/.profile && open -e ~/.profile. That worked out just fine, Do I understand what I did not really, but with time I hope to have a better understanding of what I am doing.

"touch ~/.profile" creates an empty file ~/.profile, or if the file ~/.profile already exists, it just updates its timestamp. "open" is a command that opens files into Mac OS X programs. The "-e" flag says to open the file into TextEdit. Type "man touch" and "man open" to get the manual pages to read about these commands if you like.

I now have a working "port" system. I did the selfupdate, my system in now up to date. One question if I now look at "env" this is what I get.

Freedom:~ peterhin$ env MANPATH=/usr/share/man:/usr/local/share/man:/usr/X11/man TERM_PROGRAM=Apple_Terminal TERM=xterm-color SHELL=/bin/bash TMPDIR=/var/folders/Sd/SdnvDsNAHdqx7M41XmVmb++++TI/-Tmp-/ Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render=/tmp/launch-OeUcxx/Render TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION=237 USER=peterhin COMMAND_MODE=unix2003 SSH_AUTH_SOCK=/tmp/launch-FkaAJd/Listeners __CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING=0x1F5:0:0 PATH=/opt/local/bin:/opt/local/sbin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/ usr/local/bin:/usr/X11/bin PWD=/Users/peterhin LANG=en_CA.UTF-8 SHLVL=1 HOME=/Users/peterhin LOGNAME=peterhin DISPLAY=/tmp/launch-VZvhsj/:0 SECURITYSESSIONID=b0f090 _=/usr/bin/env

Do I need to do anything with MANPATH, as mine does not resemble the example at all.

Per my earlier message, if "man port" works, do nothing to MANPATH. (If your MANPATH were empty, and you were running 10.4 or earlier, "man port" would just work, so you wouldn't need to mess with MANPATH.) If "man port" doesn't work (and it won't work for you, because MANPATH is not empty, and does not contain /opt/local/share/ man) then add the line from my earlier message which sets MANPATH.

Also my PATH seems to have extra text do leave this alone, or must I remove it.?

You should probably leave those other items as they are. The PATH defines where the system looks for programs when you call them on the command line without giving a full path. For example, when you type "man port" it looks for a program called "man" in each of the colon- separated locations specified in PATH, in order. If you type "which man" should see that it finds the "man" program in /usr/bin, one of the paths in your PATH. All your modifications to the PATH for MacPorts should be doing is adding /opt/local/bin and /opt/local/sbin to the existing PATH.