Re: About installation

[Eric Blake]

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[please don't top-post]

According to zhang yan on 1/22/2009 3:17 AM:
> hello Eric,
> I download the m4-1.4.12.16-307f from the site you gave, and
> ./configure, make, make check  these three steps can be executed
> successfully, but  there still is an error for command "make install".
> Can you help me?

Did you read the instructions in INSTALL?  Your failure means that as a
normal user, you don't have permission to write into /usr/local (and that
is generally a good thing, since the contents of /usr/local affect all
users of the machine, and should thus be a controlled activity).

So you have two options - installation into the default location
(/usr/local/...) requires root permissions, so if you have root access,
you can do 'sudo make install'.  If you don't have root permissions, then
you should instead choose a different installation during configure time
(such as './configire --prefix="$HOME"') that you _can_ write to, and
where your prefix (such as $HOME/bin) is in your PATH, and rebuild the
software before attempting the installation.  (In m4's case, you can also
take the shortcut of 'make install prefix="$HOME"' without having to
reconfigure and rebuild, although this doesn't necessarily work for all
GNU software, because some programs encode the configured locations into
the resulting binary).

- --
Don't work too hard, make some time for fun as well!

Eric Blake             address@hidden
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