realpath: illegal option -- -

[MaBecker]

On Mac OS X realpath is using different options

make clean
realpath: illegal option -- -
usage: realpath [-q] [path ...]
Cleaning targets

[gfwilliams]

Oh great. But it used to work on Mac OS? Did recent Mac OS change something, because this realpath line got added in 2020!

Does the build fail? Because the code is:

# If realpath exists, use relative paths
ifneq ("$(shell realpath --version > /dev/null;echo "$$?")","0")
compile=$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $< -o $@
else
# when macros use __FILE__ this stops us including the whole build path
compile=$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(shell realpath --relative-to $(shell pwd) $<) -o $@
endif

So it looks like if the first call failed with an error, it just wouldn't use relative paths.

Also, as far as I can see, it should never get called with -- - unless that was the current directory for some reason? I guess maybe putting quotes around $(shell pwd) and $< might fix it?

[rblakesley]

Oh great. But it used to work on Mac OS? Did recent Mac OS change something, because this realpath line got added in 2020!

It works OK for me in macOS Monterey (version 12.6), where realpath was installed via Homebrew (as part of coreutils), but I've not upgraded to macOS Ventura (version 13) yet:

rb$ which realpath
/opt/homebrew/bin/realpath

It sounds like Apple have added their own realpath in Ventura, which I guess is what you're running...? https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/450035/is-the-unix-realpath-command-distributed-with-macos-ventura

...so I suspect you'll need to brew install coreutils if you haven't already got the Homebrew version.

[MaBecker]

Running MacOS 13.0.1 which comes with /bin/realpath and brew coreutils do no longer ship realpath.

Does the build fail?

no, it's still working for me, just noticed the additional output for realpath.

[gfwilliams]

Maybe we just put a check for Macs around there and don't realpath on Apple?

[MaBecker]

Yep, like we did here

https://github.com/espruino/Espruino/blob/039ffb54415713e926f31c46c57ec4f170176422/Makefile#L85-L89

will come up with a pr for this

[gfwilliams]

Thanks!

[rblakesley]

brew coreutils do no longer ship realpath.

Ah, it looks like realpath is still in coreutils if you want it, but prefixed with "g" – the Homebrew website says:

Commands also provided by macOS and the commands dir, dircolors, vdir have been installed with the prefix "g". If you need to use these commands with their normal names, you can add a "gnubin" directory to your PATH with:

    PATH="$(brew --prefix)/opt/coreutils/libexec/gnubin:$PATH"

Maybe we just put a check for Macs around there and don't realpath on Apple?

The above looks good, but there's a bit of fiddling around needed anyway to get the toolchain working on recent versions of macOS – at some point it would probably be worth updating the build instructions.

Talking of that, I just noticed that the Python scripts don't work for me any more unless I change #!/usr/bin/python to #!/usr/bin/env python (and similarly for the Node scripts) as Python and Node no longer live in /usr/bin on macOS. I think that would still work on Linux too.