2.2 Installation

The GDBM library must be available on your system as a shared object library. For Linux systems, this is normally the case. For other systems, it may need to be built and installed. Newer versions of GDBM (e. g. 1.8.0) will automatically build a shared object library if that is possible on your system. Thus you should download the most recent version of GDBM from ftp://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/gdbm/ and install it on your system.

If, for some bizarre reason, you must use an older version, the standard distribution needs to be patched to compile for position independent code and to create a shared object library. Thus, for the older version 1.7.3, we provide a fix for the standard gdbm distribution: its purpose is to automate the creation of the shared object library. Both the standard gdbm 1.7.3 distribution and our fix can be downloaded from our ftp server:

They both unpack into the same directory (namely gdbm-1.7.3). You should unpack the standard distribution first, then our fix since it overwrites certain files.

tar zxf gdbm-1.7.3.tar.gz tar zxf gdbm-1.7.3-fix.tar.gz cd gdbm-1.7.3 ./configure make make install

We also make available the following targets: install.so, install.h, install.man, install.info.

If you install in a non-standard directory, you may have to set LD_LIBRARY_PATH appropriately so that libgdbm.so may be found.