(t)csh and dircolors problem

I encountered a little problem today, I use macports version of coreutils which gives me access to gnu versions of some commands (for full list : sudo port contents coreutils | grep /bin). My problem is related to one of those I’m using in my bashrc to color my shell : dircolors (gdircolors in macports).

This little commands allows you to generate LS_COLORS values (as the name seems to imply, it’s used by ls command) from a config file (~/.dir_colors in my case). I confidently modified this file today and was welcomed by a nice csh: Unknown colorls variable `su'.
It turns out there are an incompatibility between LS_COLORS generated by current version of dircolors in coreutils and (t)csh : tcsh treat LS_COLORS as a magic environment variable, which means it is parsed for its own use in ls builtin command.

The culprits in my .dir_colors file was :

#SETUID 37;41 # file that is setuid (u+s)
#SETGID 30;43 # file that is setgid (g+s)
#STICKY_OTHER_WRITABLE 30;42 # dir that is sticky and other-writable (+t,o+w)
#OTHER_WRITABLE 34;42 # dir that is other-writable (o+w) and not sticky
#STICKY 37;44 # dir with the sticky bit set (+t) and not other-writable

As you can see a simple fix is to comment them out.

In fact I’m not sure why I see those errors poping up, as I’m using bash ans it’s now the default in MacOSX.[…]

FUSE and SSHFS for MacOS X

FUSE is a library initially developed for Linux then ported to FreeBSD and now on MacOS X, allowing implementation of a filesystem in a userspace program.

There are already numerous implementations going on from nfs to bittorent filesystem (see Filesystems on Fuse Wiki).

Yesterday, google employee Amit Singh announced the release of a MacFuse version including, amongst other things, a Virtual file system kernel extension and a patch to sshfs.

So, we now have all elements needed to use sshfs on MacOS X, YEAHH !!!
But wait… what can we do with sshfs ?

The big things about sshfs is it allows you to mount on your local machine a remote directory through ssh. On Mac it means you see the remote directory as an external mount point (on your desktop for example, just like an external hard drive).

Currently (at least on my configuration) the finder does not allow to copy file to the mounted filesystem as it does not recognize correctly the available free space, but it works beautifully with other apps (text editor, etc.) or in the console.

Installation is a little bit fastidious for now, but if you follow carefully the MacFuse installation How-To it should not be infeasible.

When installation is complete, just got to you console and type :

mkdir /Users/yourusername/Desktop/RemoteFS
sshfs remote_username@remotehost:/your/remote/directory /Users/yourusername/Desktop/RemoteFS

This mount the /your/remote/directory on your Desktop as RemoteFS.

To unmount it just use :

umount /Users/yourusername/Desktop/RemoteFS

[…]

PostgreSQL, MySQL and Ruby Drivers with MacPorts

If you’re on MacOS X and you’re developing database aware applications you certainly want to have installed locally one or both of those populars RDBMS : PostgreSQL or MySQL.

My prefered way of doing it is through MacPorts (previously known as DarwinPorts), a package manager designed initially for Darwin and now focusing on MacOS X.

I assume you already have installed MacPorts as explain on their website.

So let’s open a console with your favorite application (I tend to prefer iTerm over Terminal.app) and enter those commands :

sudo port install mysql5 +server

this will install MySQL 5.x database and the launchd script needed to start it (on-demand or at startup).
When the installation is done you’ll be asked to install the launchd script, just ignore this part and jump to the initialization part.

To initialize MySQL and secure access to it, just enter those commands

sudo -u mysql mysql_install_db5
sudo -u mysql /opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysqld_safe &
/opt/local/lib/mysql5/bin/mysqladmin -u root password 'your_password'

You should now have a shinny new MySQL 5 installation with a password for your root account.

Then PostgreSQL, let’s type in :

sudo port install postgresql81-server

this will install PostgreSQL 8.1.x database and its launchd script.
When the installation is done, as with MySQL skip the launchd part and go to the initialization by issuing those commands :

sudo mkdir -p /opt/local/var/db/postgresql81/defaultdb
sudo chown postgres81:postgres /opt/local/var/db/postgresql81/defaultdb
sudo su postgres81 -c '/opt/local/lib/postgresql81/bin/initdb -D /opt/local/var/db/postgresql81/defaultdb'

PostgreSQL access authorization is something beyond this article, so I’ll don’t cover it.

If all goes well you should now have 2 working installations, but no simple way to start/stop them. A simple and powerful way of handling this (and launchd scripts, create/edit/load/unload) is Lingon. Just download the last version and go to the “Users Daemons” tab and you will see your two launchd scripts are there waiting for you to load/unload/enable/disable them.

To finish this installation, if you’re a Ruby kind of guy you probably want to access those databases from it. There are two ways to install the needed libraries : MacPorts or RubyGems.

For MySQL, there is no problem with MacPorts just type :

sudo port install rb-mysql

If you prefer the RubyGems solution the command is little more tricky :

sudo gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5

[Update]
For MacOS X.5 (Leopard) stock Ruby 1.8.6 :

sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install mysql -- --with-mysql-config=/opt/local/bin/mysql_config5

For PostgreSQL, you can’t do it through MacPorts unless you choose to install postgresql8 (and not postgresql81), because of the dependencies. But you can install the library through RubyGems with :

 sudo gem install postgres -- --with-pgsql-include-dir=/opt/local/include/postgresql81/ --with-pgsql-lib-dir=/opt/local/lib/postgresql81/ 

[Update]
For MacOS X.5 (Leopard) stock Ruby 1.8.6 :

 sudo env ARCHFLAGS="-arch i386" gem install postgres -- --with-pgsql-include=/opt/local/include/postgresql81/ --with-pgsql-lib=/opt/local/lib/postgresql81/ 

This is a simple and yet functional setup to work.[…]