Compiling Anything on CentOS 4

If you ever try to ./configure or make something on CentOS (or RHEL / Fedora) as a normal user, and it gives you sass:

$ make && make install
unable to execute gcc: Permission denied
error: Setup script exited with error: command 'gcc' failed with exit status 1

It’s probably because your user doesn’t have permission to run gcc. On CentOS4, only members of the compiler group (and root) can run gcc.

Solution? If this user needs to compile things, add them to the compiler group. It’s generally better to do this than to compile things as root, because, well, running foreign code as root is always risky.

To add a user to a group:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G group_name user_name

or in this case, add the user to the compiler group:

$ sudo /usr/sbin/usermod -a -G compiler bob

Done!