Question

Actually i have written a script which will download software from internet to the home dir of the current user and the it will untar it .And the i have make and make install it and in some software i have to run python setup.py install But now problem is that i did not want change the current dir to run all those commands.

is there is any way to specify path in commands (make ,make install ,python setup install)

like: python /home/username/Desktop/urllib/setup.py install

make /home/username/Desktop/somedir/

make install /home/username/Desktop/somedir/

Answer 1

According to the man page for make:

-C dir, --directory=dir
     Change to directory dir before reading the makefiles or doing anything 
     else.  If multiple -C options are specified,  each  is interpreted  
     relative to the previous one: -C / -C etc is equivalent to -C /etc.  
     This is typically used with recursive invocations of make.

So, you ought to be able to type:

make -C /home/username/Desktop/somedir/
make -C /home/username/Desktop/somedir/ install

There is nothing equivalent in Python command line. But you may consider using this in your shell script:

(cd /home/username/Desktop/urllib/ && python setup.py install)

The commands in the parentheses are executed in a “subshell”. So the working directory of your script will not change but the python command will be executed from the /home/username/Desktop/urllib/ directory. The use of && ensures that the Python command will not be executed unless the cd command is successful. You can use the same trick with the make command also:

(cd /home/username/Desktop/somedir/ && make && make install)