What files did `make install` copy, and where?

It differs for every project that you run 'make install' on. The files which are installed are controlled by the install target in the Makefile being used. Your best bet is to open the Makefile and search for 'install:' - from there you can see what files will be copied out to your system.

I was just investigating this myself while compiling a custom version of QEMU. I used the following method to work out what was installed and where (as well as using it as a basis for a .deb file):

mkdir /tmp/installer
./configure --target-list=i386-softmmu
make
sudo make install DESTDIR=/tmp/installer
cd /tmp/installer
tree .

Tree is a utility that recursively displays the contents of a directory in a visually appealing manner - sudo apt-get install tree for Debian / Ubuntu users

Hope that helps someone... it took me a bit of poking around to nut it out, but I found it quite a useful way of visualising what was going on.

The most fool-proof way is to use chroot: have "make install" run inside a chroot jail; compute a list of the files that you had before the installation, and compare that to the list of files after the installation.

Many installations will support either a --prefix configuration option, and/or a DESTDIR environment variable. You can use those for a lighter-wait version of chroot (trusting that the installation will fail if it tries to write to a location outside these if you run installation as a fairly unprivileged user).

Another approach is to replace the install program. Many packages support an INSTALL environment variable that, well, is the install program to use; there are tracing versions of install around.

make uninstall might show the files as it removes them if the author of the compiling instructions provides the information to allow an uninstall (it has been awhile since I have done one so I can't say for sure).

Also make -n install will do a "dry run" of the install process and it may be reasonable to extract the information from its results.