symlink problems with mac os

[Björn Raupach]

Hi there,

on macOS High Sierra (10.13) the kawa bash script does’t work with symbolic links.

Steps to reproduce:

1) Download and extract kawa-3.0.zip to a folder $KAWA_HOME

2) Open a terminal, create a symlink, execute symlink

$ ln -s $KAWA_HOME/bin/kawa kawa
$ ./kawa
readlink: illegal option — f
usage: readlink [-n] [file …]
Error: Could not find or load main class kawa.repl
$

Cause:

The readlink version of macOS isn’t the same as GNU/Linux one. The latter version does follow symlinks with -f. The macOS one does not support this feature.

I stumbled upon this while working on a port for MacPorts<https://www.macports.org>  Should make kawa easier to install and upgrade on macOS. (Of course it is already simple enough being a jar file and such…)

Found a related discussion on SO<https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1055671/how-can-i-get-the-behavior-of-gnus-readlink-f-on-a-mac>.


with kind regards,

Björn Raupach