Updating autoconf on CentOS

Question

I am working on a CentOS 6.8 system without root privileges. It has autoconf 2.63 installed. I need a more recent version to install something. I downloaded autoconf 2.69 and installed from source (using /configure --prefix=$home, because I have no root privileges).

It seemed to work. But when I try autoconf --version it still gives me the old version 2.63.

I tried setting the $PATH to the folder of the new installation, and even tried going into that folder and running autoconf --version there, but I keep getting the old version.

Any thoughts?

Answer 1

What is the exact path for the autoconf binary? And maybe what is the addition you made to your PATH to attempt to get it to look in there?

Without knowing anything else about your setup, my simple suggestion would be to try going into the folder with the compiled binary you want to run and run the command as follows:

./autoconf --version

That tells the shell to explicitly run the autoconf you have compiled in that directory; just running autoconf --version would run the system install of autoconf.