How do I download PSRCHIVE and Tempo2 for pulsar timing on Mac Mojave?
The documentation is somewhat confusingly written. It refers to a $PSRSOFT_DIR as a shortcut to where you unpacked the tarball, which everything is done relative to but doesn't require this shell variable to be set. So there is 1 thing to do and then you can do 1 of 2 things.

The mandatory thing (as it says in the docs) is to copy the psrsoft/config/profile.example to psrsoft/config/profile and edit if necessary (I didn't need any changes but I'm running on pretty vanilla CentOS/RHEL 7; MacOS X may well be different). Then your two options are:


You can then manually "substitute in" for the unset $PSRSOFT_DIR variable e.g.  run /path/to/Downloads/psrsoft/bin/psrsoft psrchive when the docs say to run $PSRSOFT_DIR/bin/psrsoft psrchive
You can set PSRSOFT_DIR in your user's shell startup files such as ~/.bashrc or ~/.bash_profile (~ is a shortcut to your home directory which works on Unix/Linux and I assume MacOS X) by adding export PSRSOFT_DIR=/path/to/Downloads/psrsoft/. You should then be able to run the commands as shown in the documentation.