The Practice of Code

Of all the great tips in the last post, I was moved to go and try out mtr, aka Matt’s Traceroute (or My Traceroute?), which is a command line tool that integrates ping with traceroute. When run, you get great, constantly updating results like this:

Note: This post assumes you’ve compiled software before. If not, just make sure you install Developer Tools (aka XCode) from the OS X Installer disc or from developer.apple.com before you try this.

Attempts to download and compile the latest source from the developer’s site failed. I googled around and found a working pre-compiled version, but I hate not using the latest version and not being able to compile it myself, so I searched around and found the solution. So, here are the steps to take to compile the latest mtr (0.75 at the time of writing).

export LIBS='-lm -ltermcap -lresolv'
./configure
make
sudo make install

That’s it!