10.4 Installation Names

By default, ‘make install’ will install into /usr/local/bin, /usr/local/man, etc.; that is, the installation prefix defaults to /usr/local. You can specify an installation prefix other than /usr/local by giving configure the option --prefix=PATH, or by specifying a value for the prefix ‘make’ variable when running ‘make install’ (e.g., ‘make install prefix=PATH’). The prefix variable provides a default for exec_prefix and other variables used when installing bash.

You can specify separate installation prefixes for architecture-specific files and architecture-independent files. If you give configure the option --exec-prefix=PATH, ‘make install’ will use PATH as the prefix for installing programs and libraries. Documentation and other data files will still use the regular prefix.

If you would like to change the installation locations for a single run, you can specify these variables as arguments to make: ‘make install exec_prefix=/’ will install bash and bashbug into /bin instead of the default /usr/local/bin.

If you want to see the files bash will install and where it will install them without changing anything on your system, specify the variable DESTDIR as an argument to make. Its value should be the absolute directory path you’d like to use as the root of your sample installation tree. For example,

mkdir /fs1/bash-install
make install DESTDIR=/fs1/bash-install

will install bash into /fs1/bash-install/usr/local/bin/bash, the documentation into directories within /fs1/bash-install/usr/local/share, the example loadable builtins into /fs1/bash-install/usr/local/lib/bash, and so on. You can use the usual exec_prefix and prefix variables to alter the directory paths beneath the value of DESTDIR.

The GNU Makefile standards provide a more complete description of these variables and their effects.