"make: yacc: Command not found" after installing Bison

Question

While running a makefile in gcc 4.1.2 (linux 5), I got the following error

make: yacc: Command not found

By googling, I came to know that this error can be rectified by installing Bison-GNU parser generator. But even after installing Bison, I get the same error.

How can this error be solved?

Beneficence

What OS are you under? Sounds like some linux distro, but I'm not sure which. Also, that error is pretty self-explanatory: what happens when you run whereis yacc? – Crake

the output of whereis yacc is yacc: /usr/share/man/man1p/yacc.1p.gz – Beneficence

That's a compressed man page, not an executable. – Nellynelms

That means that your $PATH does not include the yacc executable-- that's just its manual page. I'd suggest trying to find where yacc is, and finding why it's not on your $PATH. This is more of a ServerFault or SuperUser question BTW. – Crake

Answer 1

From the looks of things, your makefile is expecting a yacc executable to be available and either it's not, or it's not on your path.

Since bison is supposed to be compatible with yacc so the first thing I would try would be:

alias yacc="bison"

and try again. On my setup, /usr/bin/yacc is simply a script containing:

#! /bin/sh
exec '/usr/bin/bison' -y "$@"

You can try to locate the yacc or bison executables with the command (substituting bison for yacc if need be):

which yacc

But they're probably in one of the standard places like /bin or /usr/bin.

Nellynelms

I would suggest seeing if bison exists first, but yes, good to know. – Crake

yes Bison exists. The output of "which bison" command is "/usr/bin/bison". But even after giving "alias yacc="bison", I get the same error. – Beneficence

Then the alias is probably disappearing, or it's using a shell that doesn't have aliases. If which yacc does not turn up a valid executable, create your own /usr/bin/yacc executable along the lines of the one given in the answer. If that doesn't work then your makefile is almost certainly not seeing /usr/bin when it's running. – Nellynelms

Well, the alias works fine. "which yaac" gives "alias yacc='bison' /usr/bin/bison". The error has been resolved. Thanks paxdibolo. – Beneficence

Answer 2

Run the following command on your terminal to install bison, yacc executables and configurations.yacc comes along with bison

Also you need byacc for a full functional yacc

sudo apt-get install bison -y
sudo apt-get install byacc -y

It worked for me.

Engaged

Ubuntu 14.04 as installed - had bison but not byacc. Thanks for tip. (Upvoted). – Roughcast

Answer 3

I ran into a similar issue on RHEL7.

Find where bison is:

$:which bison

*/bin/bison*

Create symlink to bison from yacc:

sudo ln -s /bin/bison /bin/yacc

And that should solve the problem.

Monti

Answer 4

I created the alias file on my Ubuntu 16 system, while testing then I found that bison was missing so I installed bison which gave me an error about the link that I had made for /usr/bin/yacc, so the bison install creates the lnk file itself for yacc on Ubuntu 16.

Dipsomania