Chapter 2. How to compile xls2xml

The file INSTALL in the source code gives detailed instructions on how to configure, compile and install xls2xml.

Briefly, you need to run the GNU standard configure script, with the arguments you want. To see the arguments that configure accepts, run ./configure --help. The most usual argument is --prefix=PREFIX, which tells configure to install xls2xml in the directory PREFIX. After that, you need to run make to compile xls2xml, and make install to install it.

The configure script accepts, besides the standard arguments, the following flags:

--enable-osf-check. Turn on short align for OSF compiler. If you have errors while compiling under OSF1, enable this flag.
--with-xml-config=DIR. Directory where is the libxml xml-config script.
--enable-xls2xml-verbose. Turn on verbose. It is useful if you want to send a bug report. It is useful for xls2xml developers too.

A tipical session is shown below.

$ ls
xls2xml-1.0.0.tar.gz
$ gzip -d xls2xml-1.0.0.tar.gz
$ tar -xf xls2xml-1.0.0.tar
$ ls
xls2xml-1.0.0.tar      xls2xml-1.0.0/
$ cd xls2xml-1.0.0
$ ./configure --prefix=/opt
...
Configured xls2xml release 1.0.0 
$ make
...
$ make install
...
$ make clean
...

If you system support it, will be compiled and installed shared libraries, to minimize size of the executables. By this reason, is important to include the directory PREFIX/bin or /usr/local/bin (which appropiate) in the file that your system command ldconfig reads in order to regenerate the list of shared libraries (in some systems, you can list the directory in the content of the enviroment variable LD_LIBRARY_PATH instead).