I downloaded and unzipped tomcat 6.0 on my Macbook to the directory /Applications/tomcat/, and tried to run bin/startup.sh. It said it couldn't find "catalina.sh", which is in the same directory. So I did a chmod on catalina.sh:
> sudo chmod 666 /Applications/tomcat/bin/catalina.sh
Then it had a new complaint:
> sh /Applications/tomcat/bin/startup.sh
The BASEDIR environment variable is not defined correctly
This environment variable is needed to run this program
Turned out I needed to give appropriate rights to the tomcat dir. I did it a bit rude, by just giving full access:
> sudo chmod 777 /Applications/tomcat/*
Now it worked like it should. Yippie!
I guess it had to do with the fact that the zip file was downloaded. Mac always asks if I really want to open a downloaded file, so it must have some security restrictions. Anyways, it works, and hope it helps you too :-)
#1 by Dan Skaggs - September 23, 2010 at 9:37 PM