Binary packages are available for a number of operating systems (Ubuntu, Maemo, Gentoo, Windows, iPhone, and so on). But you are highly encouraged to get the source and compile it yourself to better understand the dependencies, to make examples more accessible and, of course, to have the most recent version.

A new stable release is typically published every month.

The radare development repository is often more stable than the ‘stable’ releases. To obtain the latest version:

This will probably take a while, so take a coffee break and continue reading this book.

To update your local copy of the repository, use anywhere in the radare2 source code tree:

$ git pull

Or send us a patch:

$ git diff > radare-foo.patch

The most common way to get r2 updated and installed system wide is by using:

There is also a work-in-progress support for Meson.

Using clang and ld.gold makes the build faster:

# ninja -C release install

Take a look at the scripts in sys/, they are used to automate stuff related to syncing, building and installing r2 and its bindings.

Symstalling is the process of installing all the programs, libraries, documentation and data files using symlinks instead of copying the files.

By default it will be installed in , but you can specify a different prefix using the argument --prefix.

This is useful for developers, because it permits them to just run ‘make’ and try changes without having to run make install again.

Cleaning up the source tree is important to avoid problems like linking to old objects files or not updating objects after an ABI change.

The following commands may help you to get your git clone up to date:

$ make purge