5.3. Creating the $LFS/tools directory

All programs compiled in this chapter will be installed under $LFS/tools to keep them separate from the programs compiled in the next chapter. The programs compiled here are only temporary tools and won't be a part of the final LFS system and by keeping them in a separate directory, we can later easily throw them away.

If later you wish to search through the binaries of your system to see what files they make use of or link against, then to make this searching easier you may want to choose a unique name. Instead of the simple "tools" you could use something like "tools-for-lfs".

Create the required directory by running the following:

mkdir $LFS/tools

The next step is to create a /tools symlink on your host system. It will point to the directory we just created on the LFS partition:

ln -s $LFS/tools /

This symlink enables us to compile our toolchain so that it always refers to /tools, meaning that the compiler, assembler and linker will work both in this chapter (when we are still using some tools from the host) and in the next (when we are chrooted to the LFS partition).

Study the above command closely. It can be confusing at first glance. The ln command has several syntax variations, so be sure to check the ln man page before reporting what you may think is an error.