macOS GMT 6.3.0 bundle alias mystery

Q&A
1

I’m running macOS 12 (Monterey) on an M1 Max machine, and have installed the GMT 6.3.0 bundle. If I run scripts in the Terminal window which the bundle opens, all is well. For convenience I’ll call this window the Bundle Terminal.

I have included the items at the end of the splash screen into .bash_profile so that I can run scripts in arbitrary other Terminal windows (referred to below as Other Terminal), and most things are well, except that Ghostscript fails.

I can see that in the folder pointed to by $GMSTHOME/bin the previous gs is now an alias to gsc. In the Bundle Terminal, if I type gs --version or gsc --version I get the same response.

On the other hand, in the OtherTerminal, if I type gsc --version, I get the same as before, but if I type gs --version I get several lines of errors which suggest that I’ve reached /usr/local/bin/gs-x11 instead.

If I use the alias command to point gs to gsc, then gs --version works in the Other Terminal, but my script still fails as psconvert still can’t find Ghostscript.

I don’t know why the Bundle Terminal and the Other Terminal are behaving differently in this respect.

cheers,
Richard

PS: I have the GMT 6.0.0 bundle running on an Intel Mac under 10.14.6 Mojave, which still has Ghostscript as gs, and here these same scripts run fine.

2

Does the $GMTHOME/bin entry come head of your other paths in your .bash_profile? It would seem your shell looks elsewhere first and fins the x11 version of gs. Could you also post the message from psconvert when it fails?

3

I put $GMTHOME/bin after everything else:
PATH=$PATH:$GMTHOME/bin

And here is the set of messages:

MacBook-Pro-M1max:GMT_tutorial francis$ gmt end show
sh: line 1: 18853 Abort trap: 6 gs --version 2> /dev/null
psconvert [ERROR]: Cannot execute Ghostscript (gs).
end [ERROR]: Failed to call psconvert
end [ERROR]: gmtinit_process_figures returned error 79

cheers,
Richard

4

And thanks, yes, putting it at the front of the PATH has solved it!

cheers,
Richard

ID-2020-17_Bubble_Nebula.pdf (46.2 KB)

ID-2020-17_Bubble_Nebula.pdf (46.2 KB) ID-2020-17_Bubble_Nebula.pdf (46.2 KB)

5

Oops, too many attempts to upload it ;-(

6

Great, we will improve the message in the splash screen as to the placement of that path in PATH.

7

Thanks for getting to the bottom of it so quickly, and nice to think this has been somehow useful :wink:

8

Thank you, and I have updated the message to say “prepend to path”. Merged into master already.