13.2. Using MacPorts

Once MacPorts has been installed, you can see what packages are available with the port list command. Since the list is quite long, you may want to pipe that command through the more command.

You can also use the port command to search for specific packages. For example, the command port search tightvnc returns a listing for the tightvnc package, whereas the command port search kde lists all available packages that contain the string kde. The port command may also be used to determine which variants of a given package are available. For example, the output from the port variants gnuplot command lists the universal, darwin, no_x11, and wxwidgets variants of gnuplot.