File: gawk.info,  Node: Quick Installation,  Next: Shell Startup Files,  Up: Unix Installation

B.2.1 Compiling 'gawk' for Unix-Like Systems
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* Menu:

* Compiling with MPFR::         Building with MPFR.

The normal installation steps should work on all modern commercial
Unix-derived systems, GNU/Linux, BSD-based systems, and the Cygwin
environment for MS-Windows.

   After you have extracted the 'gawk' distribution, 'cd' to
'gawk-5.2.1'.  As with most GNU software, you configure 'gawk' for your
system by running the 'configure' program.  This program is a Bourne
shell script that is generated automatically using GNU Autoconf.  (The
Autoconf software is described fully starting with *note Autoconf:
(autoconf)Top.)

   To configure 'gawk', simply run 'configure':

     sh ./configure

   This produces a 'Makefile' and 'config.h' tailored to your system.
The 'config.h' file describes various facts about your system.  You
might want to edit the 'Makefile' to change the 'CFLAGS' variable, which
controls the command-line options that are passed to the C compiler
(such as optimization levels or compiling for debugging).

   Alternatively, you can add your own values for most 'make' variables
on the command line, such as 'CC' and 'CFLAGS', when running
'configure':

     CC=cc CFLAGS=-g sh ./configure

See the file 'INSTALL' in the 'gawk' distribution for all the details.

   After you have run 'configure' and possibly edited the 'Makefile',
type:

     make

Shortly thereafter, you should have an executable version of 'gawk'.
That's all there is to it!  To verify that 'gawk' is working properly,
run 'make check'.  All of the tests should succeed.  If these steps do
not work, or if any of the tests fail, check the files in the 'README_d'
directory to see if you've found a known problem.  If the failure is not
described there, send in a bug report (*note Bugs::).

   Of course, once you've built 'gawk', it is likely that you will wish
to install it.  To do so, you need to run the command 'make install', as
a user with the appropriate permissions.  How to do this varies by
system, but on many systems you can use the 'sudo' command to do so.
The command then becomes 'sudo make install'.  It is likely that you
will be asked for your password, and you will have to have been set up
previously as a user who is allowed to run the 'sudo' command.