swi-prolog aborts (after installation via homebrew)

Question

For some reasons I had to uninstall/reinstall homebrew on my MacBook Pro (OS X 10.9). I wanted to reinstall swi-prolog via homebrew (like I did the first time). The installation process worked without any visible issue, but now every time in want to run swi-prolog in my terminal this message appears: "Abort trap: 6" I have no clue of what that means. There is a lot of things about this message on the internet but I can't relate them with my issue. Could you help me?

Answer 1

For some reason it seems that the symbolic link doesn't work correctly. In my version of swi-prolog I had to type the full path to get it to run correctly, for example:

/usr/local/Cellar/swi-prolog/6.4.1/bin/swipl

Remember to keep in mind that your version number could be different than what I have listed above.

This became extremely tedious however to remember when having to type it every time I wanted to use Prolog, so I was able to add it as an alias with this command:

alias prolog='/usr/local/Cellar/swi-prolog/6.4.1/bin/swipl'

From that point on in the current terminal session, I was able to open it by just typing:

prolog

This way is obviously much easier, however you need to remember to change the alias if the version also changes.

The command "prolog" can of course be exchanged with any command you wish to use.

Keep in mind, if you want this command to be more permanent (as in after you close the terminal window), you will need to also add the above alias command to the ~/.bash_profile file so it runs on startup.

Hope this helps!