Where can I find "make" program for Mac OS X Lion?

223
votes

Just upgraded my computer to Mac OS X Lion and went to terminal and typed "make" but it says: -bash: make: command not found

Where did the "make" command go?

9
macosmakefileosx-lion
Mysterious to me that this question is considered off-topic. - Grumdrig
the same problem and the same solution for mountain lion - bjelli
OMG how can they distribute a unix system without make sheesh - Gus
Instead of downloading 1.6GB Xcode you can download 113MB Command Line Tools from Apple - answer below by @Nick White stackoverflow.com/questions/6767481/… - Dylan Valade

9 Answers

50
votes

Have you installed Xcode and the developer tools? I think make, along with gcc and friends, is installed with that and not before. Xcode 4.1 for Lion is free.

532
votes

You need to install Xcode from App Store.

Then start Xcode, go to Xcode->Preferences->Downloads and install component named "Command Line Tools". After that all the relevant tools will be placed in /usr/bin folder and you will be able to use it just as it was in 10.6.

31
votes

It appears you can install the command line tools without getting Xcode from Downloads for Apple Developers. It required me to login with my apple account.

Alternatively, once you install Xcode from the app store, you might notice the command line tools are not installed by default. Open Xcode, go to preferences, click to the "downloads" tab, and from there you can download and install command line tools.

21
votes

Xcode 4.3.2 didn't install "Command Line Tools" by default. I had to open Xcode Preferences / Downloads / Components Tab. It had a list of optional components with an "Install" button beside each. This includes "Command Line Tools" and components to support developing for older versions of iOS.

Now "make" is available and you can check by opening terminal and typing:make -v

The result should look like:GNU Make 3.81

You may need "make" even if you don't need Xcode, such as a Perl developer installing Perl Modules using cpan -i on the commandline.

4
votes

Xcode 5.1 no longer provides command line tools in the Preferences section. You now go to https://developer.apple.com/downloads/index.action, and select the command line tools version for your OS X release. The installer puts them in /usr/bin.

3
votes

If you installed xcode and upgraded to mountain lion, or you don't have the latest command line tools installed, or you have zsh or other shells, you can shortcut to some of the embedded tools in the developer directory with:

xcrun make
3
votes

After upgrading to Mountain Lion using the NDK, I had the following error:

Cannot find 'make' program. Please install Cygwin make package or define the GNUMAKE variable to point to it

Error was fixed by downloading and using the latest NDK

3
votes

If you need only make and friends. Try installing the command-line-tools provided by Apple. (Assuming you are not doing any iOS development.)

0
votes

there are specific builds of command line tools for different major OSX versions available from the Downloads for Apple Developers site. Be sure to get the latest release of the version for your OS.