installing 'ack' and terminal help

hey, i'm trying to install ack: http://petdance.com/ack/ but the instructions on the site aren't working:


at work yesterday i asked a linux guy for help to install it on my work machine, but i'm not totally sure how he did it and i can't recreate what he did at home now. i get the gist of what is supposed to be happening but no matter what directory i put as the target path it says either "No such file or directory" or "Permission denied." i've tried /bin, /usr/local/bin, /usr/bin, and created a directory /usr/local/ack but it still won't DL. i'm sure i'm missing something simple about terminal/unix but i've been trying to figure this out for hours over the past few nights and google is no help. i have tried prefacing the commands with sudo as well but still get the same responses. i appreciate any help, even if it's a pointer to material to read.
thanks,
joe

what returns when you do a which curl?

/usr/bin/curl

Ok, so if you're issuing...

curl http://ack.googlecode.com/svn/tags/latest/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !$


do you have a ~/bin/ack directory? If you do, do you have write permissions?

i didn't, i thought the command would make one. so after it didn't work i tried making the ack directory (with mkdir) and i could cd to it, but still got Permission Denied. I did get the ack file to DL to my user directory (as in ~/ not ~/usr/) but i figured that's not where its supposed to go...? If i have that file and i can see my hidden files can i just drag it into the ack directory i made and authenticate with my password? If that works can i chmod that file or directory?

Thanks for any help, I would really like to learn more about terminal commands. It seems like it opens a whole new playground on the computer.

curl does nothing more than a get on an http address. So once the file is on your system you can move it around, etc. Personally, I'd put it in /usr/bin/
then chmod it to 755, that way it's in the path

awesome, thanks. i used the GUI to drag the ack file into /usr/bin then used terminal to chmod it to 0755 and now it works. i appreciate the help.

i guess i wanted to do it through terminal to learn how it works (instead of "cheating" by using the GUI like i'm used to). i'll continue reading up online about it.
later,
joe

in terminal you could have done a

mv filename /usr/bin && chmod 755 /user/bin/filename