Getting a Scala interpreter to work

Question

I\'m very new to Scala. I have downloaded it, got it working in Eclipse where I\'ll be developing it; but I can\'t make it work in Terminal.

All sites and books say

Answer 1

Not a big fan of cluttering up my PATH variable. I just symlink all my programs to /usr/local/bin, which is in the classpath. For example, if you downloaded scala and uncompress it in /opt/scala-2.9.0-1, run the following in the terminal.

ln -s /opt/scala-2.9.0-1/bin/scala /usr/local/bin

Now just type scala in the terminal and you're all set. This way you don't have to set your PATH or change it when you have a new version of scala you want to try out. If you download a new version, you can uncompress it in any location and symlink the new version. Say you download version 2.9.1 and uncompress it in /opt/scala-2.9.1. You can type the following in the terminal

ln -s /opt/scala-2.9.1/bin/scala /usr/local/bin/scala2.9.1

Now, to use scala 2.9.1 you just run scala2.9.1 at the terminal. When you are ready to switch to 2.9.1 fulltime, just update the symlink.

You could also add scaladoc, scalac, scalap and others in the same way

ln -s /opt/scala-2.9.0-1/bin/scalac /usr/local/bin
ln -s /opt/scala-2.9.0-1/bin/scalap /usr/local/bin
ln -s /opt/scala-2.9.0-1/bin/scaladoc /usr/local/bin
ln -s /opt/scala-2.9.0-1/bin/fsc /usr/local/bin
ln -s /opt/scala-2.9.0-1/bin/sbaz /usr/local/bin
ln -s /opt/scala-2.9.0-1/bin/sbaz-setup /usr/local/bin