Help with compiling Inform 6 on mac

Authoring Inform 6
1

Hello, could anyone guide me through compiling for Inform 6 on a mac? I feel like I’m missing something extremely basic, but I’m not sure of the terminology I need to search for what I’m doing wrong.

So far, I have the compiler, in a folder with the libraries. When I double click on it, it seems to do what I’d expect, which is open a terminal window, and run the program, with no result, because I haven’t told it what to compile.

But if I open terminal and navigate to the right place, and type “inform6”, nothing happens, with this message: zsh: command not found: inform6

I know I’ll need to put what I’m trying to compile in there too, eventually. I had assumed that double-clicking that program was the same as navigating there in terminal and typing the name, but I guess it isn’t? I must be missing something really obvious, but I don’t know enough about unix and terminal to figure it out.

(I am attempting to use PunyInform, but as far as I understand, compiling for Inform 6 should work the same no matter which library I’m using.)

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After navigating to the correct path, you need to invoke Inform by typing: ./inform6

The reason for this is that the shell doesn’t usually “look for” executables in the current directory (with the legacy cmd shell on Windows being the exception), so you need to explicitly specify that you do want to use something from the current directory by specifying ./.

The list of places where the shell does search for executables is called the PATH variable, see e.g. this page.

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Thanks! Ha ha, as I suspected, my problem was extremely low level. Okay, I’ve got it working now.

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