Linux install command

I did not know the Linux install command before.

This install program copies files (often just compiled) into destination locations you choose.

Let’s see how it can be useful.

The classic way

It’s a common pattern to create a directory or to copy a file while setting the permissions and the ownership–I will keep only the directory example but it goes the same with the file. The common pattern to do that is to run two commands

• Create the directory with mkdir and set the permissions
• Set ownership of the directory with chown.

Here is a typical example. Say we are root and we want to create a directory (test) with a specific mode (0700) and give the ownership to vagrant:vagrant. Note I’m using the verbose flag (v) which is very convenient to check what is going on without looking to the directory.

# create a directoryn with the 
mkdir -v -m 0700 /tmp/test
# mkdir: created directory 'test'
chown -v vagrant:vagrant /tmp/test
# changed ownership of '/tmp/test' from root:root to vagrant:vagrant

Using the install command

The same result can be obtained in a single install command.

install -v -d -m 0600 -o vagrant -g vagrant /tmp/test
# install: creating directory '/tmp/test'
# checking
stat -c "%n %U:%G %a" /tmp/test/
# /tmp/test/ vagrant:vagrant 600

Using install is not revolutionary however it’s good to know and it could be convenient to use it for example in Dockerfiles.

References / Further reading

• Stackoverflow answer
• install man page