bash Cookbook

Unpacking the Archive

Having obtained the archive file by one of the above methods, you need to unpack it and install it on your system. Unpacking can be done anywhere—we’ll assume you’re unpacking it in your home directory. Installing it on the system requires you to have root privileges. If you aren’t a system administrator with root access, you can still compile and use bash; you just can’t install it as a system-wide utility. The first thing to do is uncompress the archive file: gunzipbash-3.1.tar.gz. Then you need to untar the archive: tar -xf bash- 3.1.tar. The -xf means “extract the archived material from the specified file.” This will create a directory called bash-3.1 in your home directory. If you do not have the gunzip utility, you can obtain it in the same way you obtained bash or simply use gzip -d instead.

The archive contains all of the source code needed to compile bash and a large amount of documentation and examples. We’ll look at these things and how you go about making a bash executable in the rest of this appendix.