Strange problems compiling teTeX 3.0

Colin Watson cjwatson at ubuntu.com
Tue Aug 9 17:08:03 CDT 2005


On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 11:38:14AM +0200, Christoph Bier wrote:
> Colin Watson schrieb am 08.08.2005 01:32:
> > On Mon, Aug 08, 2005 at 01:09:18AM +0200, Christoph Bier wrote:
> >>Sorry, the subject is not that exact. But I didn't came up with a
> >>better one. On friday I wanted to install teTex 3.0 on my laptop,
> >>that runs Hoary (also installed on friday). But already the first
> >>command using the Bash returns an error:
> >>
> >>$ sudo ./configure --disable-multiplatform > configure.log 2>&1
> >>bash: configure.log: No permission
> > 
> > Looks like you unpacked the TeTeX tarball as root, thus arranging that
> > the unpacked directories were owned by root; and they aren't
> > world-writable, so your ordinary user cannot write to them. Note that
> > when you use constructions like 'sudo command > file', the redirection
> > is performed by your ordinary user-privileged shell, not by sudo or by
> > the command running with root privileges.
> 
> Ok, thank you very much for your answer. That's it! I'm not yet
> familiar with sudo, sorry. I thought it was similar to 'su -' with
> the difference, that it only applies to the command called with sudo.

It is, sort of. However, this is a matter of shell syntax, not sudo
syntax.

> > My first advice would be not to unpack the tarball as root, since
> > there's generally no need to do so. Failing that, 'chown -R' the
> > unpacked tree after unpack so that your ordinary user can write to it.
> 
> As I unpacked it to /usr/src/ I had to do so.

I never bother using /usr/src/, and if doing so is the only reason why
you need to use elevated privileges then you might be best not to do so
either. A good place to unpack source packages is simply your home
directory.

> >>I never observed such a thing and I use Debian for more than seven
> >>years now. Actually the same command succeeds on Debian Sarge.
> > 
> > This behaviour of shell redirections is standard across all Unix
> > variants of which I'm aware.
> 
> I have to learn more about sudo. But you deleted an important part
> of my message. I wrote: »If I run this command as root both
> configure and configure.log are empty files afterwards! Strange,
> isn't it? I never observed such a thing and [...]«. That's the thing
> I never observed.

It honestly just looks like the result of a typo to me, such as
accidentally typing '> configure' instead of '> configure.log' at some
point with a command that produced no output.

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]



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