It is bad practice to use make install. Period.

Why? Because it installs files everywhere on your system—if you’re lucky, only in /usr/local—with no guaranteed way to cleanly remove them afterwards.

Yet, sometimes, there is no other option, for example if some software is not packaged for your Unix of choice and you don’t have time to do it yourself. There are some easy and rather straightforward ways around it, which I usually recommend to beginners.

It happened again today. So I recommended the use of /opt/PKG-VER as an installation prefix and stow(8) to make the software seamlessly available to the rest of the system. Nothing fancy or novel, but I thought I’d share the summary email in the hope it would help others.

My email read as follows.

First of all, never do a bare make install. Always install to a directory specific to your software. /opt is rather standard base path, and this can be told to make with variables such as PREFIX or DESTDIR (though you might need to look into the Makefile or documentation to find if it is different). Try a non-root run first to make sure it tries to install in the right place.

sudo make PREFIX=/opt/PKG-VER install

Then, your package is in $PREFIX, with the normal directory layout, but the system can’t see it because it is not in its usual paths. You can create symlinks to all the files in your package in the usual system paths using stow(8).

stow -d /opt/ -t /usr/local/ PKG-VER

You can use -n to do a dry run to make sure it does what you want first. Removing the symlinks is equally easy.

sudo stow -D -d /opt -t /usr/local/ PKG-VER

As an added bonus: de-installing (well, deleting) files from a previous make install without PREFIX. You need to have another copy of the installed layout, this time done with the PREFIX

cd $PREFIX
find -type f -exec echo rm /usr/local/{} \; # Double check that we will only remove what we want
sudo find -type f -exec rm /usr/local/{} \; # Do it for real

Note the -type f option to find(1), which tells it to only work on files, and not directories. Otherwise, you might end up removing things such as /usr/local/lib (particularly if you used rm -rf), and it will be painful.