Installing Sublime Text's command line tool 'subl' in terminal, permission denied?

George Ananda Eman picture George Ananda Eman · Apr 17, 2012 · Viewed 54k times · Source

I'm tryng to use Sublime Text from the terminal, for example by typing subl.

I'm following the steps from Sublime Text's website:

Setup

The first task is to make a symlink to subl. Assuming you've placed Sublime Text 2 in the Applications folder, and that you have a ~/bin directory in your path, you can run:

ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl

I keep getting permission denied : ~/bin/subl: Permission Denied

I have been searching around for a similar problem but can't find one that's applicable. Can someone point me to the right direction?

Answer

Subash picture Subash · Jun 14, 2012

I am assuming that you don't have the bin directory. You can do the following:

cd 
mkdir bin
sudo ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" ~/bin/subl

ln -s will create a alias of the subl file in your bin directory and you will be able to run the command.

If this still doesn't work you will have to edit your .bash_profile. You can do it by following commands: (NOTE: For this to work you need to have done the above steps already.)

  1. Open your .bash_profile:

    cd                  // this will get you back to home directory
    vim .bash_profile   // this will open your .bash_profile file
    
  2. Edit .bash_profile: press I to get into "insert" mode and add following:

    export PATH=$PATH:~/bin
    
  3. Save and exit. Press Esc to get into command mode:

    :wq   // saves and close file
    exit  // exits terminal
    
  4. Reopen the terminal:

    subl --help
    

That should bring up the help for Sublime Text.