3.4 Running the configure Script
To create the Makefiles needed to build netCDF, you must run the
provided configure script. Go to the top-level netCDF src/ directory.
Decide where you want to install this package. Use this for the
"–prefix=" argument to the configure script below. The default
installation prefix is "..", which will install the package's files in
../bin, ../lib, and ../man relative to the netCDF src/ directory.
Execute the configure script:
./configure --prefix=whatever_you_decided
The "–prefix=..." specification is optional; if omitted, ".."
designating the parent directory will be used as a default. There are
other options for the configure script. The most useful ones are
listed below. Use the –help option to get the full list.
--prefix- Specify the directory under which netCDF will be
installed. Directories lib and bin will be created, as well as some
others. The default value for prefix is one directory up from the src
directory, where the build takes place.
--disable-flag-setting- By default the configure script changes some compiler flags to allow
netCDF to build on your platform. If you wish to specify compiler
flags which conflict with the ones added by the configure script, then
use this option to instruct configure not to attempt to set any
compiler flags. It is then the responsibility of the user to correctly
set CPPFLAGS, CFLAGS, etc. (Note that this flag does not affect some
setting of flags by configure for GNU platforms; it just turns off any
special netCDF flags.
--enable-64bit- Compile for 64-bit platform on Sun, AIX, HPUX, or Irix. (Has no effect
on other platforms). Since this works by setting some compiler flags,
this option is incompatible with –disable-flag-setting.
The configure script will examine your computer system – checking for
attributes that are relevant to building the netCDF package. It will
print to standard output the checks that it makes and the results that
it finds.
The configure script will also create the file "config.log", which
will contain error messages from the utilities that the configure
script uses in examining the attributes of your system. Because such
an examination can result in errors, it is expected that "config.log"
will contain error messages. Therefore, such messages do not
necessarily indicate a problem (a better indicator would be failure of
the subsequent "make"). One exception, however, is an error message in
"config.log" that indicates that a compiler could not be started. This
indicates a severe problem in your compilation environment – one that
you must fix.
