Hi!!!

i want to install a third party application on my system (fedora 9)
for that i downloads a .tar.bz2 file and do the following steps

1 download .tar.bz2 file
2 extract it in some directory
3 ./configure
4 make
5 make install

i want to install this application in directory " /opt " how can i do this??

and want to know how it works.

If you are using "make", then there is a file named "Makefile". I believe this has the instructions for where the executable gets located.

Use ./configure --help to see what options are available. If it's an autoconf script (most ./configure scripts are), then you can set the install directory with --prefix.

./configure --prefix=/opt

This doesn't work with everything, of course, but most developers use autoconf these days though, and most who don't have enough sense to support the --prefix option, so it should work just fine. You might want to check the Makefile (this is only created after running ./configure), there should be a line like 'prefix = /opt' (sometimes it's PREFIX), view it with less and use / to search. Occasionally you'll get a moronic package (usually in early development) that doesn't support an alternative location and you have to edit the Makefile manually, but if it has a configure script, it's rarely a problem.

Usually a ./configure --help will print out all available options for the configuration of such application, that's if the programmers created a good package with options.