Before installing the Gawk package you have to apply a patch, which fixes the following issues: Gawk's default location for libexecdir is $prefix/libexecdir/awk. This location doesn't comply with FHS (which never mentions a directory called libexecdir). The patch allows us to pass --libexecdir to the configure script (without gawk tacking on /awk to the end), so that we can use a more appropriate location for gawk's libexecdir (/usr/bin in the book). The default data directory for gawk is $prefix/share/awk. A package specific directory should be named using the package and version (like gawk-3.1.3 instead of awk) because there may be more than one awk interpreter on a system (and more than one version of gawk). The patch changes this to $prefix/share/gawk-3.1.3 to be more correct. The patch ensures that this directory ($prefix/share/gawk-3.1.3) is removed along with its contents on a make uninstall. patch -Np1 -i ../&gawk-patch; Now prepare Gawk for compilation: ./configure --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/bin Compile the package: make This package has a test suite available which can perform a number of checks to ensure it built correctly. Should you choose to run it, the following command will do so: make check And install the package: make install