sed "s/-ltermcap/-lncurses/" Makefile | make -f -: This will replace -ltermcap with -lncurses in the Makefile and pipe the output of sed (the modified Makefile) directly to the make program. This is an alternate and more efficient way to direct the output to a file and tell make to use that alternate file. We do this because libtermcap is declared obsolete in favor of libncurses.