installing MARK on a Mac

[fbude]

While there are a number of posts in various places outlining approaches to installing the MARK binary on a Mac (ostensibly, to interface with RMark), most of those instructions detail download, copying and installing of various individual packages (such as current versions of GCC from HPC), which are likely to break as files change names or move around. A beast like GCC needs to be handled by a package manager.

An up-to-date version of GCC is available from homebrew, but you need to tell MARK to look for those libraries instead of using MacOS's stock clang libraries. Simon Bonner has created a script to do this and packaged it in a homebrew Formula along with the MARK binary so that it is easy to install.

For most up-to-date instructions on this approach: https://github.com/sjbonner/mark-on-mac

Note: The MARK binaries are compiled for Intel-based Macs only (not the ARM M1-M2 chips...perhaps someday, but not at present).

In summary --

1) Install homebrew:

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/usr/bin/ruby -e "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/master/install)"

2) Install gcc:

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brew install gcc

3) Install mark:

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brew tap sjbonner/tap
brew install mark-on-mac


You can check that the installation has worked by running

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which mark


If successful you'll find mark in

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/usr/local/bin


There may be (currently?) a slight wrinkle which is that this will break when GCC is updated via

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brew upgrade

However, this is fixed simply by changing the library path in the shell script.

And now you're !