Choosing a different executable in bash

开发者_开发百科When I want to run make to generate some executables it always uses the Sun make located at /usr/local/bin/make rather than GNU make which can be found at /usr/sfw/bin/gmake.

How can I tell the OS to use GNU make rather than Sun's? Do I need to overwrite the path somehow?

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For two executables named identically, reorder paths in the PATH variable, since the first match will be used.

Otherwise, define an alias in your ~/.profile or ~/.bashrc file:

alias make="/usr/sfw/bin/gmake"

Or a function:

make() { /usr/sfw/bin/gmake "$@"; }

Note, that aliases work only in interactive mode. Scripts will not see them. Use functions in such case.

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you can link /usr/sfw/bin/gmake to /usr/bin for example as long as the directory where you link it to is before /usr/local/bin in the PATH variable thus

    cd /usr/bin
    ln -s /usr/sfw/bin/gmake make

just be sure there is no make already in the path. otherwise you always can call gmake instead of make to use gnu-make and leave make for the sun-version-make.

otherwise you can use the alias as in the previous post

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If you're manually running the make command, then simply type gmake instead of make. It will run the GNU version (assuming that your PATH) variable is set properly.

If there's an IDE or some other tool that's invoking make, you need to tell it to use gmake rather than make and the way to do that depends on which tool you're using.