Where do I put mxmlc so that I could just type 'mxmlc' in the terminal to compile a swf file?

Question

I'm on a Mac and I'm trying to make a Vim plugin for compiling/running actionscript files. First, I need to run mxmlc on the command line, but to do that I have to keep on typing the path to it. Where do I place it so that I don't have to retype the path?

Answer 1

There are a few ways to answer this:

• In one of your directories searched by PATH (see the list with echo $PATH)
• Add a new directory to PATH (e.g. in your ~/.bashrc export PATH=$PATH:/path/to/bindir)
• Add an alias to your program (e.g. in your ~/.bashrc alias mxmic=/path/to/mxmic)

(I'm assuming you're using bash shell, which is usually the case you can check with echo $SHELL)

Answer 2

You need to modify your "$PATH" environment variable, so that the tool is in that directory. However, if you want to make this very easy... you can download my macosx-environment-setup.tar.bz2 program. If you execute the "install.sh" script using "sudo ./install.sh", it will setup your environment in such a way that if you use "/Library/Flex4SDK" as the location for the Flex4SDK, it will automatically find it, define FLEX_HOME to point to that location, and it will also ensure that the binaries from the Flex4SDK are in your PATH.

Side Note: This is up on the web, because I use it in my Development Environment Setup How-To Guides. If you aren't too keen about running "sudo ./install.sh", you need to choose a location (I am going to assume "/Library/Flex4SDK", so that the tools are located in "/Library/Flex4SDK/bin"), and then you would simply need to edit your "~/.profile" file (using "nano ~/.profile"), adding the following to the very end:

export FLEX_HOME=/Library/Flex4SDK
export PATH="$PATH":"$FLEX_HOME/bin"

Note that these changes occur in your shell... they will not affect programs that are launched by double-clicking them in Finder. In order to affect those programs, you will need to place the environment variables in a file named ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist. See Automatically build ~/.MacOSX/environment.plist for a script that will automatically generate such a file using the current environment variables defined in your shell.