This page gives basic information on installation procedures.
For standard Gnu distributions the filename consists of the package name, a version number and extensions. For example, msort might be in a package msort-8.52.tar.gz. By Gnu coding conventions, such packages always unpack into a directory with the same name and version number (packages which do not are considered ill-behaved). To build Gnu software, change to the package directory, and run the configure and make programs, then use `su' to become superuser (`su sudo' on Mac OS X) and do make install, then `exit' to leave super-user mode. So for msort one might do this:
tar zxf msort-8.52.tar.gz cd msort-8.52 ./configure make su make install exit
Note that on some systems you need to configure the library directory explicitly when installing libraries (pcre, tre, uninum, utf8proc):
./configure --libdir=/usr/lib64
Perl packages have a common installation procedure as follows:
tar zxf <package>.tar.gz cd <package> perl Makefile.PL make su make install exit
For Windows there are some Perl systems which provide a facility to download pre-built packages.
18 Dec 2019Steve Tinney
Steve Tinney, 'Installation Basics', Oracc: The Open Richly Annotated Cuneiform Corpus, Oracc, 2019 [http://oracc.museum.upenn.edu/doc/help/installation/basics/]