Skip to content. Skip to navigation

Pd Community Site

Sections

Personal tools

Log in
Join

You are here: Home → documentation → FAQ for Pd → How to add aliases for Pd scripting on Mac OSX

Document Actions

How to add aliases for Pd scripting on Mac OSX

Up to Table of Contents

This FAQ applies to: Any version.

I wanted to be able to use some shell scripts using Pd I wrote in Linux on MacOSX, but the shell (Terminal) session does not know how to launch binaries from within Application Bundles.

On Linux, I can start pd by typing "pd" and hitting enter. On Mac OSX, I can start the Pd App by typing "open -a Pd-extended" ... but I'd rather be able access the pd binary within the bundle directly so one script can work in Linux and OSX.

The fix is pretty simple: Add an alias to the binaries within Pd-extended.app to your shell session.

Add the following to ~/.bash_profile:

# pd commandline
alias pd="/Applications/Pd-extended.app/Contents/Resources/bin/pd"
alias pdsend="/Applications/Pd-extended.app/Contents/Resources/bin/pdsend"
alias pdreceive="/Applications/Pd-extended.app/Contents/Resources/bin/pdreceive"

Restart the shell session and now the "pd", "pdsend", and "pdreceive" commands should launch their respective targets.

Notes

~/.bash_profile is in your home directory, so any changes are only applied to your user account.

by Dan Wilcox — last modified 2013-10-18 11:38 PM