Hi Guys,

I am familiar with the installation of packages on Linux (the configure, make and make install ritual). One question though.

After I make and install, does the complied binary necessary go to /usr/bin or does that require some switch in the make tool? Basic confusion is, suppose I downloaded a tar.gz, uncompressed it in /home/
<user> and installed it, there are a whole load more files that get generated in this folder in that process. After I finish installing, can I safely delete the folder or it is possible that some of those files are used by the installed program?

Help the newbie,

Regards,
Nirav

AFAIK, you can safely delete the source folder after running make install. Perhaps keeping the tarball would be a good idea though, because there is often a "make uninstall" that cleanly removes the program.

However, this is not always the case. Sometimes the binary may be created in the source folder. Do a ls in this folder to see.

I hope this helps
--Ian

You could delete it to check. If the program works, you're set. If not you can always just restore the deleted file from the trash.

if you can launch the program from a shell in some random directory then you can be pretty sure that the program isn't installed in your home directory.

also try 'whereis <program name>'

No. Many programs will come with /usr/local/bin as default, or KDE based apps will often install to /opt/kde/bin. In many cases you can change this when configuring.

should be possible with most configure files. Maybe you do a "./configure --help" and read yourself, there are many other options available to finetune where files will be installed (--prefix should be enough though in most cases).