PREREQUISITES To build rlwrap, you'll need an ANSI C compiler (gcc will certainly do) and GNU readline 4.2 or later. rlwrap should compile on most unices and unix-like environments like linux, the BSDs, darwin, solaris and cygwin. INSTALLATION ./configure make make install CONFIGURATION OPTIONS configure can be called with a number of options (e.g. if you want to install rlwrap in a non-standard place). Do ./configure --help to see them all. Most of them are not specific to rlwrap, except the following three:: --enable-spy-on-readline : If we want to keep the display tidy when re-sizing the terminal window or printing multi-line prompts, we have to know whether or not readline is in horizontal-scroll-mode (i.e. wheter long lines are scrolled or wrapped). At present, this involves a look at a private readline variable - if you feel guilty about that, disable this option. --enable-homegrown-redisplay: some people report ddouble echoing of user input. Enabling this option will cure the problem - though the display will then flicker over slow connections (cf. BUGS) --enable-debug: Adds a --debug option to rlwrap's repertoire. This will make rlwrap write debug information to a file /tmp/rlwrap.debug (cf. the output of rlwrap --help for more info) UNINSTALLATION To uninstall, do 'make uninstall' INSTALLING AS NON-ROOT If you want to install rlwrap as non-root, you should call configure with the --prefix option, like: ./configure --prefix=$HOME after which 'make install' will install rlwrap in $HOME/bin You may have to install GNU readline (e.g using ./configure --prefix=$HOME in the readline source directory) rlwrap's configure script will not find this installation automatically, but ./configure --prefix=$HOME CFLAGS=-I$HOME/include CPPFLAGS=-I$HOME/include LDFLAGS=-L$HOME/lib should work. You can add '-static' to LDFLAGS if you want to build a statically linked rlwrap.