GAP under OSX

Alexander Hulpke

May 2018

OSX is built on top of Unix, and the installation of GAP thus is considered as a variant of the Unix installation. Depending on your background you might consider this as a return to sanity, or as the inmates running the asylum.

The default way of running GAP thus is through the Terminal App and requires to compile a binary first.

It thus merits mentioning a nicer shell, Gap.app, that incorporates functionality of the xgap package and comes with precompiled GAP binaries. This interface is produced by Russ Woodroofe and is available at https://cocoagap.sourceforge.io

If you want to compile GAP on your own you first must install the C-compiler package, which comes as part of Apple's XCODE. Download XCode in the App Store, start it, and make sure the command line tools are installed. Then open a terminal window, go to the folder into whiuch you unpacked GAP (This folder will likely be named gap4r9p1 or similar) and type the following two commands:

./configure
make


Alexander Hulpke (hulpke@colostate.edu)