how to compile the sorcecode of the offical ls.c source code?

I downloaded the official ls.c source code and tried to compile it with gcc. The problem was that the gcc showed me a lot of errors.

$ gcc ls.c -o ls
ls.c:38:20: fatal error: config.h:

I did fix a lot of those errors by searching with the find command into my dictonarys

$ find /usr/src/ -name "nameofthelibary" 2> /dev/null

for some libarys i found the correct path, so for example i could place them into the #include <config.h> => #include </usr/src/linuxheader.../config.h>as i mentioned this method worked for some libarys but not for the header for example #include "die.h"

so my question is now: is there any way to compile this ls.c ? cz i want to learn how it works by modifying it

1 Answer

ls is part of the coreutils package and as such depends on both other files within coreutils, and the configuration steps. You probably could spend a long time unravelling it from the library but unless you're planning on compiling this a few hundred times a day, I don't think it's worth it.

As pim said in the comments, you can learn about the full build process from the README.hacking file in the root of the git tree. I ran the following without really paying that much heed but this is what worked for me.

sudo apt install git build-essential
sudo apt build-dep coreutils
git clone git://
cd coreutils
./bootstrap # grabs submodules, sets up configuration
./configure # does actual compiler configuration
make clean # remove old attempts
make -j8 # compile using 8 threads (you might want to alter this)

That will compile everything in the src directory and leave the binaries in there. You can run your newly compiled ls with ./src/ls. You can make changes and as long as they're lightweight, you can re-compile them with just the make steps.