Hi, I’m trying to get SCALE to work but I’m so confused by what they mean by PATH and I’m stuck.
https://github.com/spectral-compute/scale-docs/blob/master/docs/manual/how-to-use.md
I’m at the CMAKE step.
This is the official guide I’m following. I do understand what they mean by SCALE_PATH though as that is clearly explained but PATH is just very vague to me or I’m just misunderstanding it completely.
PATH is a shell variable that defines where stuff can be executed from without writing their absolute path.
So the export PATH command just adds the scale stuff to the path.
Well, I progressed quite a bit and learned a lot more than I knew until now but I give up. This is way over my head, I’ll stick to using ROCM for now. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction at least.
Sorry to tell you to RTFM, but little obstacles like this will be WAY easier to deal with if you just commit some time to learning the basics. I’d recommend linuxjourney.com, if you take the time to fully understand everything there you will know more than 99% of people here about this stuff
Thanks, I’m still not sure I completely understand but I think this iis how it’s supposed to be
Explaining like you are 5:
If you have worked with programming languages, you might have come across global variables and inbuilt functions/keywords.
PATHis a similar global variable for your terminal session.Every time you open up a terminal, you load up these “global variables”, and you/programs can access them (or the applications assigned to them).
So, let’s say you have your application (executable) as
/home/werecat/corncob/bin/corn, instead of starting it with./home/werecat/corncob/bin/corn ..., if you have/home/werecat/corncob/binin yourPATHvariable, you can just use it ascorn ....export PATH="/home/werecat/corncob/bin:$PATH"just means:
PATH = /home/werecat/corncob/bin + PATH- persist (export) path for the duration of this session (usually until you close the terminal tab)
If you see somewhere to add it to your
/home/werecat/.bashrcfile, it means “all commands in .bashrc file are auto-executed every time you start a new terminal session, so if you have it there, you won’t need to manually keep entering the command over and over again”.You can list these environment variables by just running:
envAlso, recommend you have a look at https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/how-to-set-an-environment-variable-in-linux/.
Hope this helps. Good luck on your Linux journey.
So I don’t know how much you know about the shell, but the way that the linux command line works is that there are a set of variables, called environment variables, which dictate so me behavior of the shell. For example, $PATH variable, refers to what directories to search through, when you try to execute a program in your shell.
The documentation you linked, wants you to create a custom shell variable, called SCALE_PATH, consisting of a folder path, which contains the compiled binaries/programs of scale you want to run.
This command:
export PATH="${SCALE_PATH}/bin:$PATH"temporarily edits your PATH variable to add that folder with the scale programs you want to run to your path, enabling you to execute them from your shell.
