"Kjetil S. Matheussen" &lt;k.s.matheussen(a)notam02.no&gt; writes: Something like this, so it supports both prefix and DESTDIR, creates the directories it needs if they don't exist, depends on the binaries being built first, and uses install rather than cp (which fails if the binary's in use): DESTDIR = prefix = /usr/local bindir = $(prefix)/bin targets = jack_capture jack_capture_gui jack_capture_gui2 install: $(targets) mkdir -p $(DESTDIR)$(bindir) install -m755 $(targets) $(DESTDIR)$(bindir) The reason for not building DESTDIR into bindir directly is that you should be able to configure and build the package with DESTDIR set, and not have the DESTDIR burnt into the binaries. This doesn't matter for jack_capture, but it's still a good habit to get into if you're rolling your own build system. I wrote a guide to making software packageable a while ago which might be of interest: http://offog.org/articles/packaging/ -- Adam Sampson &lt;ats(a)offog.org&gt; <http://offog.org/>