Tag Archives: command line

Xcode and Bandwidth Caps

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For a long time, I’ve been in the habit of installing Xcode on Macs, even though I wasn’t developing software. (Partly because I wasn’t sure what I needed to run Fink/MacPorts/Homebrew, and partly because I think FileMerge is pretty sweet, even if it’s the last thing on this list of features.) But lately, the typical Xcode update is like 7 GB, and I just don’t need it. 

7.6 GB worth of awesomeness. :-/

So I wanted to know how to get rid of these monstrous downloads. And I found out. First, you get rid of Xcode. But that’s only step one:

$ cc
 xcrun: error: active developer path ("/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/Developer") does not exist
 Use sudo xcode-select --switch path/to/Xcode.app to specify the Xcode that you wish to use for command line developer tools, or use xcode-select --install to install the standalone command line developer tools.
 See man xcode-select for more details.

So, next, you have to get rid of the command line tools and reinstall them:

$ rm -rf /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools
$ xcode-select --install

UPDATE: When that doesn’t work, you read further down that page and find the correct answer:

$ sudo xcode-select -s /Library/Developer/CommandLineTools

MacPorts tip

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I started getting messages when I tried to update my MacPorts tools. I can’t say when it started, because I don’t do it very often. (Like maybe once a month. Bad me.) But it would bomb out, telling me

Error: checksum (md5/sha1/rmd160) mismatch for port.

Then it sent me down a wrong path, suggesting it was because my ISP’s DNS was serving ads or something. But it turns out the why isn’t important, because the what to do about it was right there in the FAQ:

$ sudo port selfupdate
$ sudo port clean --dist {portname}
$ sudo port install {portname}

All I had to do was clean out the bad portfile and try again.

Diff Tools

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My favorite diff tool is FileMerge, one of Apple’s developer tools, which can be accessed from the command line as opendiff.

But from the command line, my (next most) favorite diff tool is colordiff. It’s called that because it color-codes the output when it’s used interactively, making it IMHO easier to see what’s changed. Actually, colordiff is just a wrapper around the real diff tool.

Another nice tool is dwdiff, which is compares two documents and highlights the different words rather than the different lines. So does wdiff.

(Back to my list of Unixy tools for the Mac.)