To build and install rsync $ ./configure $ make # make install You may set the installation directory and other parameters by options to ./configure. To see them, use: $ ./configure --help As of 2.4.7, rsync uses Eric Troan's popt option-parsing library. A cut-down copy of release 1.5 is included in the rsync distribution, and will be used if there is no popt library on your build host, or if the --with-included-popt option is passed to ./configure. If you configure using --enable-maintainer-mode, then rsync will try to pop up an xterm on DISPLAY=:0 if it crashes. You might find this useful, but it should be turned off for production builds. RPM NOTES --------- Under packaging you will find .spec files for several distributions. The .spec file in packaging/lsb can be used for Linux systems that adhere to the Linux Standards Base (e.g., RedHat and others). HP-UX NOTES ----------- The HP-UX 10.10 "bundled" C compiler seems not to be able to cope with ANSI C. You may see this error message in config.log if ./configure fails: (Bundled) cc: "configure", line 2162: error 1705: Function prototypes are an ANSI feature. Install gcc or HP's "ANSI/C Compiler". MAC OSX NOTES ------------- Mac OS X (Darwin) seems to have an IPv6 stack, but it does not completely implement the "New Sockets" API. <http://www.ipv6.org/impl/mac.html> says that Apple do not support IPv6 yet. If your build fails, try again with --disable-ipv6. IBM AIX NOTES ------------- IBM AIX has a largefile problem with mkstemp. See IBM PR-51921. The workaround is to append the below to config.h #ifdef _LARGE_FILES #undef HAVE_SECURE_MKSTEMP #endif