Tagged with make

Installing make on Windows with MSYS

It's time to see where MSYS and MinGW is again. There's now an installer to take care of all of the versions for you. Get it here. I don't know why this process is always so difficult - some combination of outdated documentation and changes in the packaging system. Let's see how far we get.

  • Choose to get the latest repository catalogues.
  • Get the MSYS basic system to get make.
  • Get the developers toolkit, too.
  • Install to the default location (c:\MinGW)

If you want to use all of these goodies from cmd.exe you need to update the path. (Note this isn't the recommended way of doing things - the MinGW want to avoid modifying the path and prefer you do things on a per process basis. See here for more details.) Otherwise, you can just run everything from a msys shell.

To update the path:

  • Right-click on "My Computer" and select "Properties".
  • Click Advanced -> Environment Variables.
  • I'm going to update the PATH in the User Variables section to not mess around with system-wide settings. So, in the "User Variables" box scroll down to the line that says "PATH", Edit... that value, and append ";C:\MinGW\bin;C:\MinGW\msys\1.0\bin" to the end of the current value.

Now you should be able to use things like make and gcc from the command line. Hey, that was pretty painless.

Tagged , , ,