cobol GnuCOBOL installation with GNU/Linux GNU/Linux install
Example
For most GNU/Linux distributions, a version of GnuCOBOL is available in the repositories. GnuCOBOL was originally OpenCOBOL, rebranded when the project became an official GNU project. Many repositories are still using open-cobol as the package name (as of August 2016).
For Fedora, and other RPM based package managers
sudo yum install open-cobol
For Debian, Ubuntu and APT based packages
sudo apt install open-cobol
This is usually version 1.1 of the compiler suite, and will deal with the compile time and runtime dependencies required when using GnuCOBOL.
From source, (hosted on SourceForge at https://sourceforge.net/projects/open-cobol/) you will need.
- A C compiler suite;
build-essential(or similar) - BerkeleyDB and BerkelyDB development headers;
libdb,libdb-dev(or similar names) - GNU Multi-Precision numeric library;
libgmp,libgmp-dev - A version of
curses;ncurses,ncurses-dev - The source kit,
gnucobol-1.1.tar.gz(or better,gnucobol-2.0.tar.gz) - (For changing the compiler sources,
GNU Autoconftools are also required).
From a working directory, of your choice:
prompt$ tar xvf gnucobol.tar.gz
prompt$ cd gnucobol
To see the possible configuration options, use:
prompt$ ./configure --help
Then
prompt$ ./configure
prompt$ make
Assuming dependencies are in place and the build succeeds, verify the pre-install with
prompt$ make check
or
prompt$ make checkall
That runs internal checks of the compiler (make check) and optionally runs tests against the NIST COBOL85 verification suite (make checkall). Version 1.1 of OpenCOBOL covers some 9100 NIST tests, recent versions cover more than 9700 test passes. The NIST COBOL85 testsuite is no longer maintained, but is a very comprehensive and respectable set of tests. COBOL is highly backward compatible, by design intent, but new COBOL 2002 and COBOL 2014 features are not part of the NIST verification suite.
The internal checks cover some 500 tests and sample code compiles.
If all is well, the last step is
prompt$ sudo make install
Or, for systems without sudo, become the root user for make install or use a ./configure prefix that does not require super user permissions. The default prefix for source builds is /usr/local.
If more than one build has occurred on the machine, and local libraries are re-installed, this needs to be followed up with
prompt$ sudo ldconfig
To ensure that the linker loader ld cache is properly refreshed to match the new compiler install.
cobc will be ready for use.
cobc --help for quick help, info open-cobol (or info gnucobol) for deeper help, and visit http://open-cobol.sourceforge.net/ for links to the Programmer's Guide and a 1200+ page FAQ document.
Installation problems, issues or general questions can be posted to the GnuCOBOL project space, in the Help getting started Discussion pages on SourceForge.
