start.boot

Exiting Erlang on OSX

lokifirebringer — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 23:53:24 +0000

Here’s a couple ways to exit the erlang shell on OSX when you can’t interact with the shell:

Close Terminal

This is definitely the easiest way. It will stop the shell and anything that may be running from the erlang shell.

Using Top

Sometimes you open erlang as a detached process from the shell and can’t close it. So what can you do? This is where top comes in, along with the command kill. top lists the processes running on the computer. kill terminates a process you specify with its PID (Process ID). Here’s how:

open a new Terminal window with command n
type top
look through the list that appears until you find the PID of the erlang process which is listed on the far left
press control c
type kill followed by the PID of erlang and press enter.

That will terminate erlang along with any programs you were running from erlang.

That’s all the ones you really need to know on a mac.

Adding Erl to your path

lokifirebringer — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 23:14:55 +0000

Follow these steps precisely and it should turn out all right:

open Terminal
type cd $path and press enter
type nano .bashrc

This should open .bashrc in the nano text editor. If you run OSX, you can type open -e .bashrc and open it in TextEdit instead.

press the down arrow key until it no longer moves.
If it is at the end of a line with words on it, press enter to move to a new line.
type alias erl= followed by the path to the erl file (which is located in the bin folder inside where you installed Erlang) along with erl at the end.
press control x
press y
press enter
type source $HOME/.bashrc

You should now be able to type erl and access the Erlang Shell.

Installing Erlang

lokifirebringer — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 00:45:19 +0000

Erlang source code can be found at erlang.org

Mac OSX

What you will need:

The Developer Tools

The Erlang source code

A little bit of time

Steps to take:

Once you have unpacked the source by double-clicking on it, open Terminal.
cd to the source directory. For those of you that haven’t spent much time with Terminal put the source in your home folder, type type cd otp without the quotes, press tab and then enter. This will point Terminal to the contents of the source folder.
Type ./configure and press enter. If you are not an administrator on the computer, add – -prefix= followed by the absolute path to where you want to install it. So, if I wanted to install it in my Home folder, I would type: - -prefix=/Users/Sam/.
Wait
Type make
Wait some more
Type make install
Wait once more

Erlang is now installed. To make sure it installed correctly, type erl. This should bring up something close to this:

Erlang R13B01 (erts-5.7.2) [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.7.2 (abort with ^G)

Erlang R13B01 (erts-5.7.2) [smp:2:2] [rq:2] [async-threads:0] [kernel-poll:false]

Eshell V5.7.2 (abort with ^G)

Type q(). to exit the erlang shell.

Windows

The windows installer can be found at the link at the top.

Linux

Steps to take:

open Terminal
type apt-get install erlang

However, if you feel like installing from the source, follow the steps outlined above in Mac OSX. Instead of the developer tools, you’ll need a working copy of gcc.

Welcome

lokifirebringer — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 17:30:34 +0000

Welcome to the Erlang Jargon blog. Here I hope to provide information that will be usefull to those who wish to start learning Erlang along with the advance Erlang Programmer.

First off, I am not a professional Programmer. I do it for fun in my spare time, and there seems to be less and less of it these days. If I do not post for a few days, rest assured that I will post when I get the chance.