Difficulty Using FastX Toolkit on Mac

I downloaded the FastX toolkit precomplied binaries for “MacOS X 10.5.8 (32-bit)” (hannonlab.cshl.edu/fastx_toolkit/download.html). However, when I cd into the directory with the tools and try to execute any of them, I get the error:

-bash: /usr/local/bin/fastq_quality_filter: cannot execute binary file

I’m not positive but it seems like it might be because the file kinds are “Unix executable” which might not be compatible with Mac (though I downloaded the binaries that were supposedly for Mac). I’ve tried chmod + x but the files already have execution permission so that didn’t help. Any other ideas?

I don’t have a Mac, but my recollection is that recent OS versions don’t work with 32-bit binaries. It seems to be what you have downloaded – at least it says so in the file name. I think you will either need to download 64-bit binaries or re-compile.