Installing Lua on Linux

For installation, download the binaries, build them and install them. The steps for building and installing are listed below.

Download the Lua binaries from the site:-
1. Download the source: http://www.lua.org/ftp/lua-5.1.4.tar.gz
2. Extract the tar ball
3. Run this command from lua-5.1.4 directory: "make linux test"
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If you get an error that readline or history.h not found, then try installing the following package:-

sudo apt-get install libreadline6-dev
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To check what files exist in a package, use the following command:-
dpkg-query -L <package name>
Like:-
dpkg-query -L libreadline6

If you don’t find any header files and only .so files, then it means you are having the shared libraries and not the source. So you need to install the source files as well.

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To get the list of packages and their names if you don’t know, then one can search using the following command:-
sudo apt-get cache search readline

This will give you the list of all the packages containing the name readline
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How to build and install binaries from the package:-
Once the binaries are downloaded and the command “make linux test” is run, you need to now install the generated files.

For that enter the following command:-
sudo make install

This will install the Lua binaries to the required path.

Now you can run the files using the terminal.
user@ubuntu32$ which lua
/usr/local/bin/lua
user@ubuntu32$ lua
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