The curl Application and One-Step GNU-Darwin Auto-Installer for OS X (Unix Power Tools, 3rd Edition)

40.8. The curl Application and One-Step GNU-Darwin Auto-Installer for OS X

Go to http://examples.oreilly.com/upt3 for more information on: curl

The cURL, or curl, application acts similar to wget, except that it works with more protocols, including FTPS, GOPHER, DICT, TELNET, FILE, and LDAP, as well as HTTP, HTTPS, and FTP (Section 40.8). It also supports kerberos, cookies, user authentication, file transfer resume and so on. You can access the application at http://curl.haxx.se, though curl is installed by default on some systems, including Mac OS X Darwin.

In particular, curl is used to download and install the GNU-Darwin auto-installer for OS X, otherwise known as One-Step.

The following command starts the process of installing the basefiles for One-Step. Note that the One-Step installation can take a considerable length of time, and you might get messages about needing to modify certain aspects of the installation, such as adding a font path and so on. Still, the instructions are very clear and once the installation is finished, you'll then be able to use One-Step.

# curl http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/one_stop | csh

You can CTRL-c at any time during the download portion, and continue the installation at a later time. Use caution, though, with interrupting the installation during the final build portion. You can view the installation script for One-Step at http://gnu-darwin.sourceforge.net/one_stop.

One of the applications installed during the process is pkg_add, which you can use to add additional packages at a later time by specifying the command followed by the URL of the package:

# pkg_add url

-- SP