Why do I get permission denied when I try use “make” to install something?

Question

I\'m trying to install something and it\'s throwing me an error: Permission denied when I try to run make on it.

I\'m not too fond of the unive

Answer 1

I had a very similar error message as you, although listing a particular file:

$ make
make: execvp: ../HoughLineExtractor/houghlineextractor.hh: Permission denied
make: *** [../HoughLineAccumulator/houghlineaccumulator.o] Error 127

$ sudo make
make: execvp: ../HoughLineExtractor/houghlineextractor.hh: Permission denied
make: *** [../HoughLineAccumulator/houghlineaccumulator.o] Error 127

In my case, I forgot to add a trailing slash to indicate continuation of the line as shown:

${LINEDETECTOR_OBJECTS}:\
    ../HoughLineAccumulator/houghlineaccumulator.hh  # <-- missing slash!!
    ../HoughLineExtractor/houghlineextractor.hh

Hope that helps someone else who lands here from a search engine.