Building things without root access

Here are a few notes on building C programs on a system you don't own and don't have root access to. Obviously, this has a few strange operational implications.

A pseudo-root

I'll be building things using a subdirectory of my home dir, /user/inst, as the basis of everything (basically replacing what would be /usr/local in normal installs).

./configure

If the autoconf variables are typical, things should run correctly by

./configure --prefix=/user/inst
make
make install

Run ./configure --help to find out if there are more variables to set.

Compiling based on non-global libs

Compiling a simple program based on Gnu MP normally looks like this:

gcc -o sample sample.c -lgmp

Add a couple things to make it work using your own version:

gcc -o sample sample.c -lgmp -I- -I/user/inst/include -L/user/inst/lib

Any normal -I switches should come before -I-.