I’m trying to install a script based program, but I have trouble understanding the instructions

Question

This program XDS is a simple program to process data, but since I’m a noob at everything I have no clue what anything beyond the:

“For the bash shell you could append the following lines to your standard initialization file ~/.bashrc (For Mac OS use ~/bash_login instead” means.

I’m installing on a macOS, version 10.14.6. It should be similar enough to Linux.

Installation

System or administrator privileges are not required for installation. The XDS package is just a folder containing the executables listed above and all you have to do for installation is to include this folder in the search path for executables.

Uncompress and untar the downloaded file. This will create a directory named XDS-INTEL64_Linux_x86_64, for example, when you selected the XDS-package for your Intel Core Duo processor running Ubuntu8.1.

Type echo $SHELL to find out which shell you are using. For the bash shell you could append the following lines to your standard personal initialization file ~/.bashrc. (For Mac OS use ~/.bash_login instead).

export PATH=full_path_name_to/XDS-INTEL64_Linux_x86_64:$PATH
export KMP_STACKSIZE=8m

The first line makes the executables of the XDS package accessible, while the second line defines the stack size limit of the Linux POSIX threads libraries used by OpenMP for xds_par. The limit 8m may need to be increased if xds_par collapses with a segmentation fault in the COLSPOT or INTEGRATE step for some of your data sets.

This completes installation of the XDS package for the example case. As a check you can open a new terminal window and issue the command which xds or which 2cbf or which forkxds. Removal of an obsolete XDS package is equally simple and only requires deletion of the folder and of two lines in your ~/.bashrc script. There are no other side effects to worry about.

Answer 1

First, access the ~/.bash_login file by typing nano ~/.bash_login. Add the following two lines to the file:

export PATH=full_path_name_to/XDS-INTEL64_Linux_x86_64:$PATH
export KMP_STACKSIZE=8m

Note: replace the part full_path_name_to to the actual path to the directory. For example, if your path is /usr/local/XDS-INTEL64_Linux_x86_64, you would put the following in the .bash_login file:

export PATH=/usr/local/XDS-INTEL64_Linux_x86_64:$PATH

When you are finished, save the file with Ctrl+O, and then exit nano with Ctrl+X.