Trying to install on MacOS (M1)

[Anonymous]

Hi,

First thing to say: I'm a non-technical user, so I'm in at the deep end here! I've downloaded gnucobol-3.2 onto my Mac and ran ./configure && make && make install and this worked, to a point, but it failed with

checking mpir.h presence... no
checking for mpir.h... no
configure: error: in /Users/grahamcarter/Downloads/gnucobol-3.2': configure: error: neither GMP nor MPIR library are found, but one of those is mandatory Seeconfig.log' for more details

Is anyone happy to hold my hand through this installation process?! Thank you. I used to work on VMS but have very little Unix knowledge and don't know where to go to find the missing packages,

Thank you!

Graham

[Simon Sobisch]

You have two options:

1. learn this, getting back and forth
   • by hand-holding
   • by documentation/blogs/...
2. use a pre-built version

I personally would tend to the second option, using homebrew.
I don't run MacOS, but from https://formulae.brew.sh/formula/gnu-cobol it looks like the process would be

$> /bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"  # get homebrew, if not avalailable yet
$> brew install gnu-cobol   # get gnucobol
$> cobc -xjv some.cob       # create a first COBOL executable and execute it, with verbose output

[Anonymous]

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)" # get homebrew, if not avalailable yet
$> brew install gnu-cobol # get gnucobol
$> cobc -xjv some.cob # create a first COBOL executable and execute it, with verbose output