Building Vcftools Executable

Question

[Nasir]

Hello all

Could someone please tell me how to build a vcftools executable I can run from the command line? I have tried running make and nmake in the same directory as the vcftools makefile, but have not been successful. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

[Lars Juhl Jensen]

What goes wrong? Unless you provide more detail (e.g. error messages), nobody will be able to help you.

Answer 1

[Jorge Amigo]

the information on vcftools' documentation page is very precise. in fact it is very short and simple: you only need to run "make" on the vcftools folder after uncompressing the tar ball you downloaded, and the installation will be immediately performed.

but as you mentioned nmake, the M$ version of make, I think you are trying to install vcftools on a windows machine, and although it is a perl based tool I'm pretty sure it uses the power of linux/unix environments through system calls. it is not stated on the documentation, but I believe vcftools is only supposed to be used on a linux/unix environment, not on a windows machine. if this is your case, you may have to start thinking about alternatives such as cygwin (creates a unix environment on top of your windows machine), virtualbox (allows running multiple OS in parallel), wubi (allows easy installation of dual-booting ubuntu on a windows machine), or directly installing a linux distro on your machine.

[Nasir]

Thank you Jorge! You deduced my problem exactly, in spite of the lack of details in my question. I will now give your very useful suggestions a go.