From: Tim Hunter Date: 2007-07-03T07:49:01+09:00 Subject: Re: I've um... broken Ruby Sharon Phillips wrote: > > I'll try stripping it all and building from source. I'm a pretty > experiences Windows guy, but most of that knowledge is meaningless in > the *nix world, so here's a dumb question: How do I remove all the > stuff i installed? Finder doesn't seem to show a lot of places (which > is good), and I'm not familiar with where everything goes. Also, am I > limited to vi or pico when editing .profile files, or is it possible > to use a gui based editor? > Finder won't show you these directories, afaik. Start Terminal.app and use a command line. Unlike Windows, OS X doesn't impose a particular directory into which things must be installed. Instead you pick a directory to install into and then add that directory to OS X's list of places to look. To keep the list short there are some conventions. Very, very critical programs are installed in /bin. Other programs and libraries that the system needs are in /usr and its subdirectories. You do not want to mess with these directories. Locally installed programs and libraries are typically installed in subdirectories of /usr/local. This is the default directory for most generic installer programs. Fink installs things in directories rooted at /sw. MacPorts installs things in directories rooted at /opt. If you're really willing to go back to the starting gate you can simply delete these two directories, although it means you'll have to reinstall Fink or MacPorts if you wanted to use them again. When you install Ruby "by hand," the default install directory is /usr/local. You can use any text editor to edit .profile as long as it doesn't introduce formatting information into the file. That is, don't use a "word processor" like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org Writer or OS X's TextEdit. Lastly, congratulations on learning how to use OS X! OS X is a magnificent workhorse of an operating system. Yes, iLife and all that are wonderful, but if all you ever do with your Mac is click on things you're wasting a good part of your computer. -- RMagick OS X Installer [http://rubyforge.org/projects/rmagick/] RMagick Hints & Tips [http://rubyforge.org/forum/forum.php?forum_id=1618] RMagick Installation FAQ [http://rmagick.rubyforge.org/install-faq.html]