Unable to determine OS

Question

When I go on terminal (i installed smlnj) and i type sml it gives me the error sml: unable to determine architecture/operating system. What does this mean??? I installed sml like this at this website, but I'm not sure -- are the instructions wrong?

Answer 1

The problem with recent OS X binary installers still persist just the focus moved to 10.9 Mavericks and 10.10 Yosemite versions of OS X. Although the root cause is solved in the recent source code version.

That is why from some time now solving this issue is just about having a freshly compiled binary package. And for that you might be better of installing smlnj through homebrew. You can do it with these commands:

brew update
brew cask install smlnj

As of 2021, the command to install with cask is

brew install --cask smlnj

This will compile the package for you so you can spare the trouble of checking out the source code and doing the compilation yourself.

Just to clean up your system and avoid duplication you can remove the previous installation simply by doing the following:

sudo rm -rf /usr/local/smlnj*

For the asterisk: I had one bare smlnj folder with the 110.76 inside it and one smlnj-110.75 folder I guess I had tried to install two different versions earlier...

You might need to remove any softlinks that you created yourself that point to the older smlnj folder directly under /usr/local/ removed in the previous step.