About

I am the long term user of Linux based operating systems. And as a C developer mostly working on stuff built by GNU autotools. Therefor I need to quickly build, install and test new versions of the software. I usually make changes to lower layers (like zeromq/czmq).

Typical advice for Linux is to not run things as a root!

What is root

Linux operating systems are multi user ones. Each user account have own documents and can’t interfere with others. Except root. Root is a super user. It takes it all. Permission checks are not applied to this user. Never!

The solution

The standard installation target for autotools based make install is /usr/local. This is path can be written by root. There are many ways to do to avoid this problem. You can install using sudo helper. You can configure --prefix and related variables like PATH, PKG_CONFIG_PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH and so.

Or there is way more simpler thing to do

$ sudo chown $myuser: /usr/local

This is a tip from Pieter Hintjens book Scalable C. I actually used all three ways, however cannot be more happy with user writable /usr/local.

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