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Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition
book

Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

by Arnold Robbins
October 2005
Intermediate to advanced
908 pages
46h 42m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Unix in a Nutshell, 4th Edition

Building Software

Many of the programs listed in Chapter 2 are available in source code form from the Internet. For GNU/Linux and Mac OS X, you may be able to use a package manager to download and install the software (see Chapter 6). Similarly, for Solaris, you may be able to get a precompiled version of the program from http://www.sunfreeware.com/.

However, it’s possible, particularly on a commercial Unix system, that you will want (or need) to download the source and build the program yourself if you don’t have it, or if you wish to obtain the very latest version. This section outlines the conventional build process.

Most Internet software is written in C or C++. To compile it you will need a compiler. See the previous section for a discussion of where to get a compiler if you don’t have one.

Today’s programs usually use the GNU Project’s Autoconf software suite for managing portability issues. Autoconf generates a shell script named configure, which tests various aspects of the target system. The end result of running configure is a Makefile custom-tuned to the particular system (see Chapter 16), and a header file describing the features available, or missing, from the system. As a result, the recipe for building software is usually quite simple, consisting of the following:

  1. Download the software. This can be done with a noninteractive program such as wget or curl (see their entries in Chapter 2), or interactively using anonymous FTP for programs distributed that way.

  2. Decompress ...

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ISBN: 0596100299Errata Page