How to install cmake 3.7 in Ubuntu 16.04 using its binary archive file?

Question

I'm on Ubuntu 16.04. I installed cmake with the command

sudo apt install cmake

It installed cmake 3.5.1. Now I want to use cmake 3.7 - I downloaded an archive with binaries (i.e cmake-3.7.0-Linux-x86_64.tar.gz) and extracted it, but how do I run it using the cmake command? My current attempt to run

cmake --version

returns the "old" 3.5.1 version.

Solution

Remove old version using:

apt-get purge cmake

You can use new version of cmake by adding its bin directory path to $PATH. An alternative solution is to extract tar.gz package and go to the directory made after extracting and run following commands:

cp -r bin /usr/
cp -r doc /usr/share/
cp -r man /usr/share/
cp -r share /usr/

The second method is the same as installation process which .deb package does!

Comments

[SuB]

Which version you downloaded? source or binary?

[nikitablack]

@SuB Binary version.

[SuB]

@DavidFoerster: That problem cause is unavailability of cmake's server, but here is installing an version of cmake that does not exist in Ubuntu Repositoroes.

[David Foerster]

@SuB: Let's continue this discussion in chat.

[muru]

With the difference that you can remove a deb package easily. How do you plan to remove this when not needed?

[nikitablack]

I agree - how to remove it if we just copied folders?

[SuB]

@muru: It is drawback of installing a package using this method. Compiling from source code has the same problem in some packages! In this case this package could be removed by deleting any file which is copied. Another solution is to make a .deb package and installing it.

[SuB]

There is a package for cmake 3.7 here in Ubuntu repository for zesty version, but i recommend you not using this package. Installing this package need to force dpkg to ignore package version check and may cause broken package database.