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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?

the Tin Man
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George Ananda Eman
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3 Answers3

103

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.

the Tin Man
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Subash
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    I kept trying editing bash_profile before this post but didn't restart terminal. Didn't work... Now done! YAY! – Jono Nov 19 '13 at 02:04
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    Why would you create a bin directory in your home folder and then create a symbolic link to /usr/bin/subl? – Martijn Feb 20 '14 at 13:23
  • You'd think someone would make a "brew install subl" command... no... Error: No available formula for subl – Martin Cleaver Aug 13 '14 at 00:34
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    @MartinCleaver You should check brew cask. https://github.com/caskroom/homebrew-cask Once installed you can do something like brew cask install sublime-text – Subash Jan 14 '15 at 03:27
45

My personal preference for the path to the third-party application-specific symbolic links (e.g. subl, brew, github, mate, etc) is:

/usr/local/bin

Why not /usr/bin/?

  1. /usr/bin is a "sacred" place. It is generally recommended to store static binaries that are maintained by package management systems. subl is not this case.

  2. subl is not stable enough to be stored in /usr/bin with other basic BSD binaries (e.g. find, man, make, etc). You must modify/delete subl symbolic link manually if (a) the developers of Sublime Text Editor decide to change its app name in the future releases (as BBEdit Lite was changed to TextWrangler after version 6.1), or (b) you may simply wish to uninstall Sublime Text Editor.

Therefore, I suggest you execute the following line, assuming /usr/local/bin/ exists:

ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" /usr/local/bin/subl
the Tin Man
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melvynkim
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16

Check whether "~/bin/" is included in the path.

A better options is to create the symlink in /usr/bin directory instead. 

sudo ln -s "/Applications/Sublime Text 2.app/Contents/SharedSupport/bin/subl" /usr/bin/subl
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    type "echo $PATH" to see the path. Look for /usr/bin:/bin: If its there then the above command should work fine, It did for me. Thanks user1427458 – iancrowther Jul 04 '12 at 13:11