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Appendix E, How to install Pike

To install Pike, you need a C compiler, a couple of Mb of disk space, the source for Pike, and a bit of patience. The latest version of Pike is always available from the Pike home page. Lists of mirror sites and binary releases should also be available there. Pike should compile and install nicely on almost any UNIX platform. It has been tested on the following: After obtaining the Pike source you need to unpack it. To unpack Pike you need gzip, which is available from any GNU mirror site. You also need tar, which is a part of UNIX. If you got Pike-v0.7.1.tar.gz, simply unpack it by typing: 
	$ gunzip -d Pike-v0.7.1.tar.gz
	$ tar xvf Pike-v0.7.1.tar
Now you have a directory called Pike-v0.7.1. Please read the README file in the new directory since newer versions can contain information not available at the time this book was written.

Now, to compile Pike, the following three commands should be enough. 

	$ cd Pike-v0.7.1/src
	$ ./configure --prefix=/dir/to/install/pike
	$ make
They will (in order) change directory to the source directory. Configure will then find out what features are available on your system and construct makefiles. You will see a lot of output after you run configure. Do not worry, that is normal. It is usually not a good idea to install Pike anywhere but in /usr/local (the default) since Pike scripts written by other people will usually assume that's where Pike is. However, if you do not have write access to /usr/local you will have to install Pike somewhere else on your system.

After that make will actually compile the program. After compilation it is a good idea to do make verify to make sure that Pike is 100% compatible with your system. Make verify will take a while to run and use a lot of CPU, but it is worth it to see that your compilation was successful. After doing that you should run make install to install the Pike binaries, libraries and include files in the directory you selected earlier.

You are now ready to use Pike.

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