Run this command to install make and all the packages needed to build your code.

sudo apt-get install build-essential

This might help with Khanna111's hint:

cd /home/$USER/nagios-plugins-2.2.1 || exit 1
configure <options> && make && sudo make install

Make is a general purpose workflow program, usually used for compilation. But it can be used for anything.

When you do something like "make all", the make program executes a rule named "all" from a file in current directory named "Makefile". This rule usually calls the compiler to compile some source code into binaries.

When you do "make install", the make program takes the binaries from the previous step and copies them into some appropriate locations so that they can be accessed. Unlike on Windows, installation just requires copying some libraries and executables and there is no registry requirement as such. In short, "make install" just copies compiled files into appropriate locations.

You can also use chocolatey to install it:

choco install make

Here's the package.

In general a user may not have a bin directory. A Makefile like this allows you to say make DESTDIR=/usr/local/bin install to install to /usr/local/bin, and a default to ~/bin

# DESTDIR is where the program should be installed
DESTDIR = $$HOME/bin
prog: a.c b.c
      ${CC} -o $@ $<
install: prog
      mkdir -p ${DESTDIR}
      cp $< ${DESTDIR}

this makes the program from a couple of C file. The install target creates the bin directory if it doesn't exist (the -p stops it erroring out if it does exist) and then copies the file. Note the $$ on the shell variables.

GNU make would allow an order only prerequisite to only create the directory if it didn't exist, but the time to run mkdir is likely small compared to the time to do the compiles.

• Go to ezwinports, https://sourceforge.net/projects/ezwinports/files/

• Download make-4.2.1-without-guile-w32-bin.zip (get the version without guile)

• Extract zip
• Copy the contents to C:\ProgramFiles\Git\mingw64\ merging the folders, but do NOT overwrite/replace any exisiting files.

To build GNU packages from source the dance is:

./configure --prefix=/usr/local  # Or your preferred place
make
make install

The configure script queries your environment for all sorts of relevant details (compiler version, usability of various language characteristics, various libraries, functions that might carry different names, ...) and creates some header files from the result reflecting the required configuration. It also builds the Makefile. Running make by itself will fail, until you run configure there is no Makefile, and so no install target.

Why do you want that specific version of make? That one is a quite stable package, the announcement doesn't show any revolutionary changes.

make is a GNU command, so the only way you can get it on Windows is installing a Windows version like the one provided by GNUWin32. Anyway, there are several options for getting that:

1. Directly download from Make for Windows

2. Using Chocolatey. First, you need to install this package manager. Once installed, you simply need to install make (you may need to run it in an elevated/administrator command prompt):

   choco install make
   

3. Another recommended option is installing a Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL or WSL 2), so you'll have a Linux distribution of your choice embedded in Windows 10, where you'll be able to install make, gcc, and all the tools you need to build C programs.

4. For older Windows versions (Microsoft Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, or Windows 7 with msvcrt.dll) you can use GnuWin32.

An outdated alternative was MinGW, but the project seems to be abandoned, so it's better to go for one of the previous choices.

Run the command:

sudo apt-get install build-essential

Chances are you will need things like gcc to actually do the building so you might as well install those as well. The build-essential package will install other tools used along with make.