DOKK / manpages / debian 12 / checkinstall / checkinstall.8.en
CheckInstall(8) System Manager's Manual CheckInstall(8)

checkinstall — Track installation of local software, and produce a binary manageable with your package management software.

checkinstall [options] [install command]

checkinstall is a program that monitors an installation procedure (such as make install, install.sh ), and creates a standard package for your distribution (currently deb, rpm and tgz packages are supported) that you can install through your distribution's package management system (dpkg, rpm or installpkg).

Note that for most useful actions, checkinstall must be run as root.

These programs follow the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options starting with two dashes ('-'). A summary of options is included below.

All the options that toggle a switch default to activate the option. To force activation or deactivation, call them with '=yes' or '=no'. As an example, to disable stripping use --strip=no.

Show summary of options.
Show version information.
Show Copyright information
Choose packaging system. Can be one of 'slackware', 'debian' or 'rpm'.
Create a Debian package.
Create a RPM package.
Create a Slackware Package.
Toggle installation of the created package.
Enable/disable filesystem translation. Filesystem translation enabled causes the install to proceed in a temporary directory, thus not actually touching your system.
Accept default answers to all questions.
Set the package name.
Set package version.
Set package architecture.
Set the package release.
Set package license.
Set the package group.
Set source location
Set alternate source location
Where to save the new package.
Set the package maintainer. Be careful to correctly quote/escape the name, to prevent shell expansion
Features provided by this package (currently only on RPM and Deb).
Dependencies required by this package.
Pass this flags to the rpm installer.
Use the -i flag when installing a rpm.
Use the -U flag when installing a rpm.
Pass this flags to the dpkg installer
Where the .spec file is located
Do not include documentation files.
Set debug level. Must be one of 0, 1 and 2.
Run an interactive install command
Toggle interactive install command.
Run an interactive Slackware installation script.
Toggle interactive Slackware installation script.
Toggle creation of a doinst.sh script.
Toggle stripping any ELF binaries found inside the package.
Toggle stripping any ELF libraries (.so) found inside the package.
Search for any shared libs and add them to /etc/ld.so.conf
Reset perms for all files/dirs to 755 and the owner/group for all dirs to root.root
Compress any man pages found inside the package.
Where to put documentation files.
Set the umask value.
Exclude these files/directories from the package.
Force the inclusion in the package of the files/dirs listed in the argument (a file).
Inspect the package's file list
Review the spec file before creating a .rpm.
Review the control file before creating a .deb.
Use the new (8.1+) Slackware description format ("--newslack" implies "-S")
Manually set the path to the tar binary.
Toggle deletion of doc-pak upon termination.
Toggle deletion of description-pak upon termination.
Toggle deletion of spec file upon termination.
Backup any overwritten files
Toggle backup

This program reads its configuration from /etc/checkinstallrc, which can be used to override defaults. Command line arguments override settings in the configuration file.

This manual page was written by Felipe Sateler <fsateler@gmail.com> for the Debian system (but may be used by others). Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU General Public License, Version 2.

On Debian systems, the complete text of the GNU General Public License can be found in /usr/share/common-licenses/GPL.