How to invoke ipython in Mac OS X?

[Diez B. Roggisch]

Lou Pecora wrote:

> In article <4pk8r8FjagluU1 at uni-berlin.de>,
>  "Diez B. Roggisch" <deets at nospam.web.de> wrote:
> 
>> Lou Pecora wrote:
>> 
>> > I installed the SciPy superpackage and have pylab, matplotlib, scipy,
>> > and numpy apparently running well.  But I want to use matplotlib/pylab
>> > interactively.  The instructions suggest doing this in IPython.  But
>> > using ipython on the command line gives me an error.  The system
>> > doesn't
>> > know the command.  Apparently there is no ipython executable in one of
>> > the bin directories.  I thought the superpackage would add that
>> > automatically, but I guess not.
>> > 
>> > Can anyone tell me how to get ipython running on my MacOSX 10.4 system?
>> 
>> This is just a guess - but did you check your
>> 
>> /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/bin
> 
> 
> Just checked it. Nothing there for IPython.

Are you sure you checked in all possible locations - it might well be that
e.g. the shipped python2.3 is under 

/System/Library/....

I can't check up on that myself, as at work I'm using Linux.

Where it is depends on which python interpreter you used to compile scipy.
And possibly it got installed under /usr/local/bin - this could be caused
by scipy installing it there.
 
>> directory for the ipython-binary? Usually, that will be the prefix of
>> anything compiled/installed to framework-builds. So either you add that
>> to your path, or create links to e.g. /usr/local/bin
> 
> I'm not quite following this last suggestion.  Can you explain more.

_If_ the binary got installed there, you need to add the path to your
PATH-environment, or create a link to a location that is in the path.

For example, I have

ln -s /Library/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/2.4/bin/pydoc /usr/bin/pydoc2.4

on my system, to have the pydoc2.4 command available.

You could also create an alias, of course.

Diez