Preparing the archive file for compilation under Unix Many of the big files on archives are compressed. Files with .z or .gz need to be uncompressed using gunzip . If the filename also has a .tar in it, it's a tar file which in turn contains many other files. If the filename has a .shar in it, it's a shell archive file. This will modify the files that need changing, backing-up the originals.
Distributions generally support many types of machines.
Two utilities are often used to ease compilation are configure and imake . When in doubt it asks. It is called by xmkmf and creates from a generic file called Imakefile a system-specific Makefile . Both of these utilities use the invaluable make command. See the manual page if you want to know the details.