How Do You Install Affymetrix Power Tools?

Question

[hmg]

Hello,

I am painfully new to command line stuff. I'm trying to install Affymetrix Power Tools on a Mac OSX (Mavericks). I have the files downloaded and unzipped, but I don't understand how to actually do the "Add the bin sub folder to your PATH" part. Right now, the entire APT folder is just sitting on my desktop, so the location of the bin folder is "/Users/MyName/Desktop/apt-1.15.2-x86_64-apple-lion/bin".

I found this tutorial for adding things to your PATH: http://architectryan.com/2012/10/02/add-to-the-path-on-mac-os-x-mountain-lion/#.U0Mf5K1dXIo So do I just paste the location as is, or does it need to be altered?

Sorry for my noob question... Thanks for reading!

Answer 1

[Dan D]

All that adding the binary to your $PATH environment variable will do is make it so you can launch the program by typing just the name of the binary, instead of the entire path. For example, if a binary named samtools is in a folder that is in your $PATH environment variable, you can launch it by just typing

samtools

on the command line, instead of having to type the whole path like this:

/usr/local/var/informatics/ngs/samtools-0.1.16/samtools

So yes, by pasting that folder path in the /etc/paths file, you should be able to launch APT just by typing the name of the program on the command line.

Let me know if that doesn't make sense or you have trouble.