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-3.1.1 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 $prefix/share/gawk-3.1.1 to be more correct. The patch ensures that this directory ($prefix/share/gawk-3.1.1) is removed along with its contents on a make uninstall. patch -Np1 -i ../gawk-&gawk-patch-version;.patch Prepare Gawk to be compiled: ./configure --prefix=/usr --libexecdir=/usr/bin Continue with compiling the package: make make check Finish installing the package: make install rm /bin/awk