Why do I get permission denied when I try use “make” to install something?

Question

I\'m trying to install something and it\'s throwing me an error: Permission denied when I try to run make on it.

I\'m not too fond of the unive

Answer 1

On many source packages (e.g. for most GNU software), the building system may know about the DESTDIR make variable, so you can often do:

 make install DESTDIR=/tmp/myinst/
 sudo cp -va /tmp/myinst/ /

The advantage of this approach is that make install don't need to run as root, so you cannot end up with files compiled as root (or root-owned files in your build tree).