I am trying to install xclip on a linux computer with no root access, I downloaded, decompressed and run ./configure but got an error for a missing library:
./configure --prefix=/home/user/bin/xclip/ checking for gcc... /usr/bin/gcc [...] checking for XmuClientWindow in -lXmu... no configure: error: *** libXmu not found *** How can I get overcome this error and install xclip?
You need the libXmu library – if it's already installed, you're probably missing the development headers (/usr/include/X11/Xmu and others), which many distributions require to be installed separately.
You will have to either compile libXmu the same way manually, or obtain the libxmu-dev or libxmu-devel package and extract it into, say, ~/usr.
Afterwards, set:
export CFLAGS="-I$HOME/usr/include" export LDFLAGS="-L$HOME/usr/lib" You may also need:
export PKG_CONFIG_PATH="$HOME/usr/lib/pkgconfig:$HOME/usr/share/pkgconfig" Also take a look at xsel, which does pretty much the same thing but requires less library dependencies.
Note: --prefix ~/bin/xclip will result in ugly paths such as ~/bin/xclip/bin/xclip and ~/bin/xclip/share/man/man1/xclip.1. Something like --prefix ~/usr will give nicer results.
This is especially worth noting when installing libraries; it is much easier to compile a program when all its libraries are in --prefix ~/usr, rather than each having its own --prefix.
XmuClientWindow does not exist in libXmu; it is unclear as to whether the entire libXmu or just that single symbol is missing). Here is my workaround (requires gvim and bash):
# My workaround for not having xsel or xclip function get_clip() { file=/tmp/$USER/clipboard_contents.txt /bin/rm -f $file # Help from: http://stackoverflow.com/a/23237529/120681 gvim $file -T dumb --noplugin -n -es -c 'set nomore' +'normal "*P' +'wq' cat $file } Which then can be used like:
clip=$( get_clip ) 