patch -Np1 -i ../glibc-&glibc-version;.patch: This patch converts all occurances of $(PERL) to /usr/bin/perl in the malloc/Makefile file. This is done because Glibc can't autodetect the location of perl because perl has yet to be installed. The patch also replaces all occurances of root with 0 in the login/Makefile file. This is done because Glibc itself isn't installed yet and therefore username to userid resolving isn't working yet, so a chown root file will fail, however it'll work fine if you use straight IDs. touch /etc/ld.so.conf: One of the final steps of the Glibc installation is running ldconfig to update the dynamic loader cache. If this file doesn't exist, the installation will abort with an error that it can't read the file, so we simply create an empty file (the empty file will have Glibc default to using /lib and /usr/lib which is fine). --enable-add-ons: This enables the add-on that we install with Glibc: linuxthreads --libexecdir=/usr/bin: This will cause the pt_chown program to be installed in the /usr/bin directory. echo "cross-compiling = no" > configparms: We do this because we are only building for our own system. Cross-compiling is used, for instance, to build a package for an Apple Power PC on an Intel system. The reason Glibc thinks we're cross-compiling is that it can't compile a test program to determine this, so it automatically defaults to a cross-compiler. Compiling the test program fails because Glibc hasn't been installed yet. exec /bin/bash:This command will start a new bash shell which will replace the current shell. This is done to get rid of the "I have no name!" message in the command prompt, which was caused by bash's inability to resolve a user ID to a user name (which in turn was caused by the absence of Glibc).