Installing python 2.7.2 on Debian 5.0

I'm having some trouble running the ./make command in my debian command line to install python 2.7.2.

I untarred my download from Python.org and ran ./configure which appeared to have worked fine. Unfortunately when I type in ./make I get the following error:

./make: No such file or directory

Not sure why this occurs, but I'd like to get an upd开发者_JAVA技巧ated version of python to continue learning the language.

Thanks for your help,

Andy

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When you type ./configure, it runs a executable script in the current directory (labeled with a .) called configure.

Make is an executable file, usually located somewhere like /usr/bin, which uses a file in the directory to run a bunch of commands depending on whether files are up to date.

When you just type make, your shell (the program that handles all your commands and sends their output to the terminal) will go looking through all the directories in the PATH environment variable to find an executable file called make, and run the first one it finds. But, when you type ./make, you're actually telling it to try and run an executable file in the current directory, called make. (It uses this approach, not searching the PATH variable, whenever you put a / in the command.)

You can use the . anywhere you could use a normal directory to specify the same directory, so for example: /usr/bin/././././ is the same as: /usr/bin. Similarly, you can use .. to specify the directory above, so /usr/bin/../bin/../bin/../lib is the same as /usr/lib.

So, after running the configure script located in ./, which generates a so-called makefile, you run the system wide version of make, located where ever, by just typing make, which uses the makefile to build the package.

Also, you can use the which command to find out where the command that'll run when you enter a command by itself - for example, which make.

(Apologies if any of this is condescending, I was going for completism. Also, I may have overused the code tags...)

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its not ./make

try

"make"

as it is