Prevent make install from overwriting
 

Hi,

When I run make install, I want to know which files would be changed or overwritten before running the actual command, to prevent accidental overwrite of existing files. Meaning, I want to run make install, see what changes would be made to the filesystem, then revert to a state before the make install as if I didnt execute the command

Is there any way I can do that?

Thanks in advance

Yes, it's very easy, I do sh** like that all the time.
After a fresh installation of an OS, and sometimes after some customizing, I make a compressed image of it's partition.
Then when I need to test something out, and not worry about screwing up my nice "day to day" installation, I make a new partition in free space on my drive, load an image of the OS I want to test in, and boot it up, all of this only takes less than five minutes when an image is already made.
Then hack away at this test installation. When I'm done, I wipe out the partition by writing zeros to every bit and have the space available for more testing with any of the many OS's on my drive.
I use bootitng which gives me this wonderful advantage using only primary partitions, I have at least twenty of them on average, which makes it easy to set up a testing environment at random on any part of a drive with just a couple clicks of the mouse.

You can also install some virtual software like Vmware and take snapshots of a fresh guest OS installation of the same OS as the one your using and hack away at your VM and just resort to the snapshot when next you want to start from scratch. Same principle, only now you're running more than one OS at the same time, possibly the same one.