User Guide

Building and Installing Wireshark

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-1.9-tar.gz

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

gzip -d wireshark-1.9-tar.gz

tar xvf wireshark-1.9-tar

Note!

The pipeline gzip -dc wireshark-1.9-tar.gz | tar xvf - will work here as well.

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.