I’m a big fan of the FreeBSD port system. But the last few weeks
I had problems updating my freebsd ports.

A growing number of ports were giving the following error: “cc: /sbin:/bin:/…:/root/bin: No such file or directory”

A full sample:

After a lof of debugging and digging deeply in the /work directories of the broken ports. I found out
that libtool was generating a ‘wrong’ cc command. The part -L /sbin:/bin/usr/bin … etc was wrong. The path seperator ‘:’ should not be used. I thought libtool was broken. (Rule X pragmatic programmer: “SELECT Isn’t broken” ;-) )

After dinging deeply in this script I saw the $path variable was placed in this command…

After typing ’set’ to see all environment variables I found out I defined a custom $path variable.
Probably by a typing mistake. Because the real environment variable for path is PATH (uppercase…)

After remove this variable ‘path’ (”unset path” in bash), all my problems were gone…. Yess !

So some words of wisdom: NEVER define an environment variable ‘path’ on freebsd !! (And be VERY careful with your other environment variables!)

I wanted to retrieve yesterdays date with a format of YYYYMM
This was solved in FreeBSD like this:

(SuSE) Linux doesn’t know the -v option
The same thing in Linux could be done like this:

Why the difference?

My less command of my FreeBSD installation doesn’t show the ansi colors embedded in the Rails log file. Well it does shows the codes, but I don’t want to see those.

I found a simple solution for this:

Put the code above in the ~/.bashrc/ file and less will finally show the colors…!