Macintosh Terminal Pocket Guide

Installing from TAR Files

Package managers like Homebrew are not the only means for installing software on the command line. Much free software is distributed in compressed TAR files, which we first encountered in File Compression and Packaging. You can work with these files manually to unpack, build, and install programs without a package manager. However, you’ll need to deal yourself with dependencies between programs, difficult uninstalls, and a host of other issues that package managers handle automatically. (In fact, Homebrew uses compressed TAR files behind the scenes.) Let’s examine how to work with these files.

Packaged software files with names ending in .tar.gz and .tar.bz2 typically contain source code written in a programming language.^[32] Before installing the software, you’ll need to compile (build) it. Typical build instructions are:

1. List the package contents, one file per line. Assure yourself that each file, when extracted, won’t overwrite something precious on your system, either accidentally or maliciously:^[33]

   ➜ tar tvzf package.tar.gz | less      For gzip files
   ➜ tar tvjf package.tar.bz2 | less     For bzip2 files

2. If satisfied, extract the files into a new directory. Run these commands as yourself, not as root, for safety reasons:

   ➜ mkdir newdir
   ➜ cd newdir
   ➜ tar xvzf <path>/package.tar.gz     For gzip files
   ➜ tar xvjf <path>/package.tar.bz2    For bzip2 files

3. Look for an extracted file named INSTALL or README. Read it to learn how to build the software, for example:

   ➜ cd newdir