Using portmaster to bulk install ports

As I write this there are not any packages available for FreeBSD arm. That means on the Raspberry Pi I have to build the things I need from ports. Ports gives a lot of control about how the software is built, but right now I just want the tools I need installed.

It is hard to set up ports to install a collection of tools in a oner, but we can use portmaster to do this for us. The Pi is quite slow and will take a long time to build a small number of tools and their dependencies.

Normally portmaster will prompt for configuration for each package as it builds, it will then build a list of packages and prompt again to install these. The following line will install the listed tools without any prompting.

$ portmaster -mBATCH=yes --no-confirm -y sysutils/tmux editors/vim

• The -m flag will pass options to make
• --no-confirm will disable the 'install' prompt
• -y will answer yes to any prompts