2.4. Building Wireshark from source under UNIX

Use the following general steps if you are building Wireshark from source under a UNIX operating system:

  1. Unpack the source from its gzip'd tar file. If you are using Linux, or your version of UNIX uses GNU tar, you can use the following command:

    tar zxvf wireshark-1.4-tar.gz
    	    

    For other versions of UNIX, you will want to use the following commands:

    gzip -d wireshark-1.4-tar.gz
    tar xvf wireshark-1.4-tar
    	    

    [Note]Note!

    The pipeline gzip -dc wireshark-1.4-tar.gz | tar xvf - will work here as well.

    [Note]Note!

    If you have downloaded the Wireshark tarball under Windows, you may find that your browser has created a file with underscores rather than periods in its file name.

  2. Change directory to the Wireshark source directory.

  3. Configure your source so it will build correctly for your version of UNIX. You can do this with the following command:

    ./configure
    	    

    If this step fails, you will have to rectify the problems and rerun configure. Troubleshooting hints are provided in Section 2.6, “Troubleshooting during the install on Unix”.

  4. Build the sources into a binary, with the make command. For example:

    make
    	    

  5. Install the software in its final destination, using the command:

    make install
    	    

Once you have installed Wireshark with make install above, you should be able to run it by entering wireshark.