Estimated build time: 1 SBU Estimated required disk space: 24 MB |
Before you attempt to install Bash, you have to check to make sure your distribution has the /usr/lib/libcurses.a and /usr/lib/libncurses.a files. If your host distribution is an LFS system, all files will be present if you followed the instructions of the book version you read exactly.
If both of the files are missing, you have to install the Ncurses development package. This package is often called something like ncurses-dev. If this package is already installed, or you just installed it, check for the two files again. Often the libcurses.a file is (still) missing. If so, then create libcurses.a as a symlink by running the following commands as user root:
ln -s libncurses.a /usr/lib/libcurses.a |
Now we can continue. Install Bash by running the following commands:
./configure --enable-static-link \ --prefix=$LFS/static --with-curses && make && make install |
If the make install phase ends with something along the lines of this:
then that means that you are probably using Debian, and that you have an old version of the texinfo package. This error is not severe by any means: the info pages will be installed when we recompile bash dynamically in Chapter 6, so you can ignore it.
--enable-static-link: This configure option causes bash to be linked statically.
--prefix=$LFS/static: This configure option installs all of Bash's files under the $LFS/static directory, which becomes the /static directory when chroot'ed or reboot'ed into LFS.
--with-curses: This causes bash to be linked against the curses library instead of the default termcap library which is becoming obsolete.
It is not strictly necessary for the static bash to be linked against libncurses (it can link against a static termcap for the time being just fine because we will reinstall Bash in Chapter 6 anyways, where we will use libncurses), but it's a good test to make sure that the Ncurses package has been installed properly. If not, you will get in trouble later on in this chapter when you install the Texinfo package. That package requires ncurses, and termcap can't reliably be used there.
The &&'s at the end of every line cause the next command to be executed only if the previous command exits with a return value of 0 indicating success. In case all of these commands are copy & pasted on the shell, it is important to ensure that if ./configure fails, make isn't executed and, likewise, if make fails, that make install isn't executed, and so forth.
Last checked against version 2.05a.
bash, sh (link to bash) and bashbug
bash is the Bourne-Again SHell, which is a widely used command interpreter on Unix systems. The bash program reads from standard input, the keyboard. A user types something and the program will evaluate what he has typed and do something with it, like running a program.
bashbug is a shell script to help the user compose and mail bug reports concerning bash in a standard format.
sh is a symlink to the bash program. When invoked as sh, bash tries to mimic the startup behavior of historical versions of sh as closely as possible, while conforming to the POSIX standard as well.
Last checked against version 2.05a.
Bash: bash, sh
Binutils: ar, as, ld, ranlib, size
Diffutils: cmp
Fileutils: chmod, cp, install, ln, ls, mkdir, mv, rm
Gcc: cc, cc1, collect2, cpp0, gcc
Grep: egrep, grep
Make: make
Gawk: awk
Sed: sed
Sh-utils: basename, echo, expr, hostname, sleep, uname
Texinfo: install-info
Textutils: cat, tr, uniq