I just realized that I never posted my recipe for configuring and installing libreadline on Mac OS X. I need it for use with PostgreSQL, and don’t fully understand why Apple has not yet included it with Mac OS X. Maybe it’ll be in Tiger?

In the meantime, it turns out to be pretty easy to configure it and build it yourself, assuming you have the developer tools (“Xcode”) installed. The only thing that’s different from any other Unix is that the support/shobj-conf must be modified to be able to find other libraries installed on Mac OS X. Here’s a shell script I whipped up that can do the whole thing for you, soup-to-nuts.

#!/usr/bin/sh
export VERSION=4.3
curl -O ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/readline/readline-$VERSION.tar.gz
tar zxvf readline-$VERSION.tar.gz
cd readline-$VERSION
perl -i.bak -p -e \
  "s/SHLIB_LIBS=.*/SHLIB_LIBS='-lSystem -lncurses -lcc_dynamic'/g" \
  support/shobj-conf
./configure
make
sudo make install

Hope that this helps others!

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