Question

Just bought a brand new Mac and trying to set some stuff up for school. I need to run the “open .profile” command from the Terminal, however I receive the following message:

The file /Users/user/.profile does not exist

I read online another option that if this occurs, I should run the command “vi.profile” to create the file. However, that returns the following error message:

-bash: vi.profile: command not found

I am completely new to Mac/Linux, if anyone has any help/suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

If you want to create a .profile in /Users/user, first touch /Users/user/.profile (to create the file), and then you can vi /Users/user/.profile to edit it. You might want to open the file with whatever osx’s default text editor is – vim has a pretty steep learning curve. The reason your vi.profile command isn’t working, btw, is because you are missing a space between vi, which is the program you are calling, and .profile, which is the argument you are passing to that program.