How to run ./configure command on macOS?

I want to install Pure-FTPd on my Mac running with 10.14.6 (18G1012) using this manual

When opening the Terminal app and tying ./configure --with-pam I get -bash: ./configure: No such file or directory as error message.

Why that? What am I doing wrong?

Perhaps, I have to link somewhere first like cd /path/to/somewhere?

UPDATE

I found the following and tried brew install --interactive pure-ftpd ./configure --with-pam but I'm getting Error: invalid option: --with-pam.

1 Answer

Why you can't find configure

Perhaps, I have to link somewhere first like cd /path/to/somewhere?

Yes. The command ./configure means: Run a script called configure from the current working directory. You can see your current directory with pwd – usually it's your home folder (/Users/your-username/ or abbreviated as ~).

If you downloaded the software, perhaps it's at ~/Downloads/pureftpd.

That said, I don't think you should manually attempt to compile and install software on your system if you're not familiar with how the shell works. You'd be better off using pre-compiled binaries and installation scripts like Homebrew.

Why the Homebrew command does not work

Your problem with Homebrew stems from the fact that you mixed two commands — brew install and ./configure should not be in one line. You should rather execute the brew install --interactive … command first, then wait for Homebrew to give back control of the shell in interactive mode. Now you can run the ./configure command, since Homebrew will have changed the directory for you.

Note that you should be able to just run brew install pure-ftpd. That should install the server for you.

If you're having issues configuring the server to authenticate against your system users, check out this question.

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