Alpine, Pico, Nano question

Question

Alpine, Pico, Nano question

Please excuse my Terminal newbie status; but here goes: I wish to install Alpine for email (I've downloaded, but not yet installed it). This brings Pico with it. My Terminal installation, of course, contains Nano. Fine. But as you adepts know, the standard Terminal configuration includes a "pico" command that redirects ("symbolic links"? Do I have that right?) to Nano. Isn't this going to cause a problem when Pico is, itself, installed? My intuition suggests that deleting the link might be the answer (I have no idea how this might be done), but then again +I haven't any right to intuition+. Thanks for help.

IMac, Mac OS X (10.5.7)

Posted on Jun 28, 2009 6:31 PM

Reply

Answer 1

etresoft

Level 9

56,656 points

Jun 28, 2009 6:48 PM in response to Glenn Waldmann

Glenn Waldmann wrote:
Please excuse my Terminal newbie status; but here goes: I wish to install Alpine for email (I've downloaded, but not yet installed it).

Why? Apple Mail is quite a bit more handy.

This brings Pico with it. My Terminal installation, of course, contains Nano. Fine. But as you adepts know, the standard Terminal configuration includes a "pico" command that redirects ("symbolic links"? Do I have that right?) to Nano.

Actually, I didn't know that. I had never heard of nano. It sounds like one of those "pico isn't free enough for me" political issues. I use vi.

Isn't this going to cause a problem when Pico is, itself, installed? My intuition suggests that deleting the link might be the answer (I have no idea how this might be done), but then again +I haven't any right to intuition+.

No, don't delete anything. Both nano and the pico link reside in /usr. You shouldn't change anything there. If you install alpine, it should install into /usr/local automatically. It is perfectly safe to install a copy of the real pico in /usr/local. alpine will probably use that local copy.

Reply

Answer 2

Jun 28, 2009 8:44 PM in response to Glenn Waldmann

They are both installed in /usr/bin. You can edit your file with nano once and turn around and use pico on the same file. Nano is fancier, per se. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nano_(text_editor)

Reply

Answer 3

Tony T1

Level 6

10,247 points

Jul 3, 2009 3:40 PM in response to doug pennington

pico is nano (pico is a symbolic link to nano), as Glenn said:
MacBook:/usr/bin Tony$ ls -l pico
lrwxr-xr-x 1 root wheel 4 Nov 26 2008 pico -> nano

If Glenn installs Pico, Nano will probably be run as Pico will most likely be installed in /usr/local/bin and I believe that by default, /usr/bin is the path searched first.

The command 'which pico' will show which pico is being run (also if pico -V returns "GNU nano version 2.0.1", then nano is being run, not a new installation of pico)

If you want to run pico, one way is to put an alias in .bash_profile (alias pico='/usr/local/bin/pico')

Reply