07-03-2005, 12:26 PM

Hello all,

got my lovely iBook two days ago, and I´ve messed around with it quite a bit this weekend. I´m new to the mac os, but I have to say it´s very pleasant to work in. Lovely when the os just gets out of your way!
One irritating problem has me stumped, though.

I installed Fink and Fink Commander almost right off the bat.
At some point I tried installing the Ruby packages from Fink Commander, and I told it to perform the operation in a terminal. Something went wrong though (I hadn´t set up Fink correctly yet). Now, whenever I open a new terminal, it tries to run that task again. ( /sw/bin/fink build ruby )

Quite irritating, especially since it prompts me for my admin password every time this happens. I suppose Fink Commander added something to the terminal or bash init files and didn´t clean it up after the first time it tried running the task. Didn´t find anything in .profile in my home dir, though.


So my question is this: what files are read/executed by the Terminal when it starts up? And have any of you had a similar problem?

07-03-2005, 01:35 PM

Not really very terminal proficient, but you might want to check some basics first:

1.Does fink setup a start command in your user preferences? (System Preferences->Accounts->Login Items) If Fink is listed there, select it and hit the '-' icon to stop it from starting up at login.

2. Does Fink have its own preference settings? Maybe there's a 'start fink at login' option there?

Terminals plist file is called 'com.Apple.Terminal.plist' and is located in 'users->"username"->Library->Preferences'

Maybe check to see if there is a fink entry there?

07-03-2005, 03:35 PM

Originally Posted by Aptmunich

Terminals plist file is called 'com.Apple.Terminal.plist' and is located in 'users->"username"->Library->Preferences'

Maybe check to see if there is a fink entry there?

Thanks for the tip! Found the Terminal plist file, and yep, it had the fink task stuck in it. Removed the plist file and hey presto, Terminal back to normal, just had to reset my preferences for terminals.

Follow-up question, though:

When I first found this problem I tried searching for the above mentioned fink command string. Nothing turned up, however. How thorough is the spotlight search? It obviously doesn´t find things that would turn up using a simple recursive ´grep´.

Oh and by the way, a bit strange that such things can be set for applications, and then not accessed in any way using the regular "preferences" options for the given application. The plist files aren´t very human readable.. or perhaps there is a way and I haven´t found it yet.

Anyway, thanks for putting me on the right track. Cheers!

07-03-2005, 05:00 PM

Well I think that since it is a hidden system file, spotlight doesn't ordinarily search through .plists as you'd get all these useless results when you searched for certain things... (useless for the average user anyway)

Oh and by the way, a bit strange that such things can be set for applications, and then not accessed in any way using the regular "preferences" options for the given application. The plist files aren´t very human readable.. or perhaps there is a way and I haven´t found it yet.

I'm guessing that since fink is something that probably only more experienced users would try, they figure that you'd just do everything yourself via Terminal anyway... since only *nix users would actually use Fink - and we all know how much those *nix experts love their command line

Anyway, thanks for putting me on the right track. Cheers!

Hey it was a shot in the dark, glad to be of service!
Now go download a song from my band: http://www.ampliphonic.de/media/sound/