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 universal rules of unix/linux and not too fond of user rights either. My best guess is that the user I'm logged in as does not have the privileges to run make commands, but hopefully it's something else that's not permitting me to install.

Why do I get Permission denied and what should I check or configure in order to attempt permission be granted?

EDIT

Error Message:

gcc -I. -O3 -o pp-inspector  pp-inspector.c
make: execvp: gcc: Permission denied
make: [pp-inspector] Error 127 (ignored)
gcc -I. -O3 -c tis-vnc.c -DLIBOPENSSL -DLIBOPENSSLNEW -DLIBIDN -DHAVE_PR29_H -DLIBMYSQLCLIENT -DLIBPOSTGRES -DHAVE_MATH_H -I/usr/include/mysql
make: execvp: gcc: Permission denied
make: *** [tis-vnc.o] Error 127

Solution 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).

Solution 2

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

Solution 3

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.

Solution 4

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

Solution 5

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.

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