Hypnophile

Thanks Dubious. It helps to confirm that some of what I've deduced is correct. I'd already looked through the basic guide and I've looked through the other thread-some helpful stuff there though nothing really matches my situation. I do think I better understand a few things about how the pathing works now. And your last suggestion is how I ended up here. At least now I feel I've learned a little.

I've been trying to install the Long War mod for awhile, with no success. I have a valid copy of EW from Steam, no other mods running ever. Playing on a 2011 iMac running OS X (version 10.11.3 if that matters). I actually have very little knowledge of how files work on the machine or using terminal commands. Running the shell installer, I get the common "cannot find game files, please specify XEW dir location" message. If I drag the XEW directory into the terminal window the path appears, but I get "invalid directory specified." It looks like others have had this problem as well. If I instead drag in the folder that contains XEW (XCom Data), something tries to happen and I get excited, as I'm told "old backup already exists, overwrite old backup?" Which seems to me like something wants to be installed. Say yes and... Game files: /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Library/steamapps/common/XCom-Enemy-Unknown/XCOMData/xew/backup Copying install files... cp: /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Library/steamapps/common/XCom-Enemy-Unknown/XCOMData/xew/XComData/XEW: No such file or directory cp: /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Long War/LW-EW-Linux-OSX-v1_0/install-files/xcomgame: unable to copy extended attributes to /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Library/steamapps/common/XCom-Enemy-Unknown/XCOMData/xew/XComData/XEW: No such file or directory cp: /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Library/steamapps/common/XCom-Enemy-Unknown/XCOMData/xew/XComData/XEW/config: No such file or directory cp: /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Long War/LW-EW-Linux-OSX-v1_0/install-files/xcomgame/config: unable to copy extended attributes to /Volumes/Macintosh HD 2/Library/steamapps/common/XCom-Enemy-Unknown/XCOMData/xew/XComData/XEW/config: No such file or directory ...and so on for what looks like every single game file. It looks to me like the problem is it's looking for.../XCOMData/xew/XComData/XEW, which doesn't exist of course. No idea why these are duplicated and I'm really not sure why the process thinks it should. And I'm really not sure what to try next. Thanks for any advice, please keep it simple-last time I tried doing stuff like this was DOS 3.2 I think, and I'm completely at sea here.