Installation Script for simple c++ command-line tool, tutorial?

I'm working on a simple command line tool in c++. Half as a fun learning-process thing, and half to distribute to friends/colleagues 开发者_开发知识库etc.

I assume the easiest way to make it distributable is just packaging the source code with an installation script---can anyone point me to a good tutorial for setting that up? In other words, what must a script include to compile the program, put the files in good places*, and make it executable from any directory from the command line?

• • E.g. I know the compiled binary should go in /usr/local/bin/ , but if I'm writing-to and accessing a text file (for instance), where should that go? What about a file that stores settings/configuration-parameters?

I'm on mac osx, so that would be the starting point, but portability to windows, linux, etc would be great.

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You can use CMake to make a cross platform build system, and you can use it's CPack (Wiki here) feature in order to generate binary only packages. First you create a build script that runs and installs on each platform (which CMake makes as easy as can be expected). You then run CPack to generate a package which just includes your binaries.

There is a good tutorial that covers the basic cmake process (including install commands) here.

CMake is generally considered simpler then autoconf (and has better windows support), but each has it's own strengths.

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Do not assume that the user installing the program has root access. Prompt, or provide a command-line option, like --install-prefix=/home/user/apps, to specify where to install.

I HATE programs that install shit in /usr/local. If you do that, you'd best wrap it up in an .rpm or .deb or whatever the platform package is so that your app can be cleanly uninstalled.

I would suggest checking out autoconf