8.4 Installation Names

By default, ‘make install’ will install into ‘/usr/local/bin’, ‘/usr/local/man’, etc. You can specify an installation prefix other than ‘/usr/local’ by giving configure the option ‘--prefix=PATH’, or by specifying a value for the DESTDIR ‘make’ variable when running ‘make install’.

You can specify separate installation prefixes for architecture-specific files and architecture-independent files. If you give configure the option ‘--exec-prefix=PATH’, ‘make install’ will use PATH as the prefix for installing programs and libraries. Documentation and other data files will still use the regular prefix.