[tex-live] Installing TeX live on MacOS X

[George N. White III]

On Sun, Jun 26, 2011 at 9:10 AM, Angelo Graziosi
<angelo.graziosi at alice.it> wrote:

> Il 26/06/2011 1.24, Norbert Preining ha scritto:
>
>>
>> That is *really* strange ...and I am a hard time reproducing it, since
>> as you said, on Linux it is working.
>
> Now I have discovered the culprit!
>
> I had copy/pasted the option '-force-platform x86_64-darwin' from install-tl
> --help, and now I have discovered that the hyphen there are not the right
> hypen! Re-typing the full command line from keyboard, the above option seems
> to work and the installation selects only x86_64-darwin platform!

Can '--help' be made to provide strings suitable for pasting (this
sounds like a
perldoc issue, so maybe not something that TL should be fixing)?

Pasting the wrong "look alike" character has become such a common problem
that it would be worth adding a warning: your command contains X, did you
mean "Y" for quote marks, hyphen/minus, etc.

> I apologize for the noise.

Not noise at all--you have pointed out a pitfall that no doubt will
catch others.

Using linux to cut and past the "-force-platform" from install-tl
(debian 6 using UTF-8 encoding in the Gnome Terminal),  I get:

$ echo -force-platform |od -x
0000000 662d 726f 6563 702d 616c 6674 726f 0a6d
0000020

The two "2d' values are ASCII minus.  If I do the same with the TL2010
install-tl teminal on on MacOSX, I get, as you did, something quite different:
$ echo -force-platform | od -x
0000000      88e2    6692    726f    6563    88e2    7092    616c    6674
0000020      726f    0a6d
0000024

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia