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

On many source packages (e.g. for most GNU software), the building system may know about the DESTDIR make variable, so you can often do:

 make install DESTDIR=/tmp/myinst/
 sudo cp -va /tmp/myinst/ /

The advantage of this approach is that make install don't need to run as root, so you cannot end up with files compiled as root (or root-owned files in your build tree).

Answer 2

Execute chmod 777 -R scripts/, it worked fine for me ;)

Answer 3

The problem is frequently with 'secure' setup of mountpoints, such as /tmp

If they are mounted noexec (check with cat /etc/mtab and or sudo mount) then there is no permission to execute any binaries or build scripts from within the (temporary) folder.

E.g. to remount temporarily:

 sudo mount -o remount,exec /tmp

Or to change permanently, remove noexec in /etc/fstab

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

Giving us the whole error message would be much more useful. If it's for make install then you're probably trying to install something to a system directory and you're not root. If you have root access then you can run

sudo make install

or log in as root and do the whole process as root.