10.1 Basic Installation

These are installation instructions for Bash.

The simplest way to compile Bash is:

1. cd to the directory containing the source code and type ‘./configure’ to configure Bash for your system. If you’re using csh on an old version of System V, you might need to type ‘sh ./configure’ instead to prevent csh from trying to execute configure itself.

   Running configure takes some time. While running, it prints messages telling which features it is checking for.

2. Type ‘make’ to compile Bash and build the bashbug bug reporting script.
3. Optionally, type ‘make tests’ to run the Bash test suite.
4. Type ‘make install’ to install bash and bashbug. This will also install the manual pages and Info file, message translation files, some supplemental documentation, a number of example loadable builtin commands, and a set of header files for developing loadable builtins. You may need additional privileges to install bash to your desired destination, so ‘sudo make install’ might be required. More information about controlling the locations where bash and other files are installed is below (see Installation Names).

The configure shell script attempts to guess correct values for various system-dependent variables used during compilation. It uses those values to create a Makefile in each directory of the package (the top directory, the builtins, doc, po, and support directories, each directory under lib, and several others). It also creates a config.h file containing system-dependent definitions. Finally, it creates a shell script named config.status that you can run in the future to recreate the current configuration, a file config.cache that saves the results of its tests to speed up reconfiguring, and a file config.log containing compiler output (useful mainly for debugging configure). If at some point config.cache contains results you don’t want to keep, you may remove or edit it.

To find out more about the options and arguments that the configure script understands, type

bash-4.2$ ./configure --help

at the Bash prompt in your Bash source directory.

If you want to build Bash in a directory separate from the source directory – to build for multiple architectures, for example – just use the full path to the configure script. The following commands will build bash in a directory under /usr/local/build from the source code in /usr/local/src/bash-4.4:

mkdir /usr/local/build/bash-4.4
cd /usr/local/build/bash-4.4
bash /usr/local/src/bash-4.4/configure
make

See Compiling For Multiple Architectures for more information about building in a directory separate from the source.

If you need to do unusual things to compile Bash, please try to figure out how configure could check whether or not to do them, and mail diffs or instructions to bash-maintainers@gnu.org so they can be considered for the next release.

The file configure.ac is used to create configure by a program called Autoconf. You only need configure.ac if you want to change it or regenerate configure using a newer version of Autoconf. If you do this, make sure you are using Autoconf version 2.69 or newer.

You can remove the program binaries and object files from the source code directory by typing ‘make clean’. To also remove the files that configure created (so you can compile Bash for a different kind of computer), type ‘make distclean’.