Hi.
I am using openSUSE 10.2 on my system. Recently, I screwed up my system while updating the kernel to 2.6.19.1 and so I had to do a reinstall. Later, while trying to install a game (Super Maryo Chronicles), I followed the following steps:

1) sh ./autogen.sh (there was a file called autogen.sh in the untarred SMC folder)
2) The above command created a file called configure in the directory.
But when I try to run ./configure, bash says "configure : Comand not found".
I tried to see if theres a manual entry for configure (man configure) but theres not even a manual entry for it.
THe thing is all these commands were working fine before the reinstall. What could be wrong? I tried the ./configure command for other packages but got the same result.
What do i need to do to resolve this?

That error message seems odd--there's a space before the colon, which smells.

Anyways, things I would try: running "bash ./autogen.sh" and "./autogen.sh" instead of "sh autogen.sh", and similarly for ./configure; try all nine combos, do they all produce the same output? What is the top line of autogen.sh and configure, respectively (I would think #!/bin/bash or #!/bin/sh)?

All of this shouldn't matter (bash should be sh-compatible), but it might. My theory about the space before the colon is that configure treats a variable (whose value is the empty string) as a command and tries to run it (compare with user@host$ '' foo). So, run "bash -x configure" and post the 10-or-so lines around the error message. If I'm right, I suspect that I(/we) will need to see the whole configure script.

Try this out and report back. Hope this helps.

Maybe you need to make it executable first. Run chmod a+x configure and try again.
You won't find a man entry for configure, as this script is specific for the respective software. But mostly, you can list available options with ./configure --help

Hey jonaskoelker. Im sorry i misleaded u but actually i havent copied the error msg straight from the command line. I just typed it out while writing the post. I checked, and theres no space there.
I will put up the results as you say.


I tried that. Again, command not found.

Could this be coz I reinstalled opensuse over the older installation? what i mean is i did not erase the hard disk before the install, although I resized and reformatted the partitions. But I have a doubt about this because after I finished the install, YAST asked me if I wanted to use the users i created in the previous installation. I said a yes and was able to select the users i ad created earlier.
ALso, I reinstalled from a different source. That is, the earlier installation I had done from the iso files I had downloaded. But I did the reinstall from a DVD that came with a mag.

Here are my experiments:
Note the subtle differences. What is your path (echo $PATH)? Try running "bash -x configure" (or ./configure); what is the result? If it's big, grep for "command not found", and show us a 10-line(-or-so) context ($ bash -x configure 2>&1 | grep -iC10 "command not found").

How did the chmod +x go? What about trying all combinations of {bash ,sh ,./}?

hey.
its working now.
i first tried sh configure...this worked. Then i did chmod a+x configure..after this ./configure is working too. But i havent undrstood what i have done.
whats the diff beth running sh configure or ./configure or all the others? What does chmod a+x do?
I am still learning the command line.
thanks a lot.

chmod changes permissions. the 'a' stands for all, '+' means add new permissions, and 'x' is short for execute. The 'all' is all of {the owner, members of the owning group, other people}.

Try saying 'ls -l configure', there you can see the permissions.

If a program "foobar" starts with "#!/path/to/intepreter", then saying "./foobar" is the same as saying "/path/to-interpreter foobar". So, if configure start with #!/bin/sh, it should be the same as saying 'sh configure' (sh is a shorthand for /bin/sh; try saying "echo $PATH").

The reason 'sh configure' works even though configure doesn't have execute permission is that it "doesn't count as executing" (whereas ./configure does); sh just reads the configure file, in the same way that "kwrite foobar.txt" doesn't execute foobar.txt, it just reads it (in programming parlance, sh _interprets_ the program 'configure').

Hope this helps. Otherwise, I think google has lots of tutorials

hey..thnx for all the help