Installing without root has too many errors

[Paddy Landau]

I'm trying to install autojump on a system where I have no root access. I found these instructions: #36

Unfortunately, those instructions are rather out of date, so I've adjusted the process as follows. It doesn't work, and my comments explain what is happening.

1. git clone git://github.com/wting/autojump.git

2. cd autojump

3. ./install.py --prefix ${HOME}
   • This runs, and asks me to add the following to ~/.bashrc.

[[ -s /home/paddy/.autojump/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh ]] && source /home/paddy/.autojump/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh

(/home/paddy is my home folder.)

4. Add that line to the end of ~/.bashrc.

5. Close terminal and reopen.
   • PATH has /home/paddy/.autojump/bin added to the front of it.
   • Function j is defined.

6. The problem is that /home/paddy/.autojump/bin doesn't exist! The folder /home/paddy/.autojump contains nothing but the two directories etc and functions.

7. In an attempt to fix this, I linked ~/.autojump/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh with a rename and chmod, as follows.
   • mkdir ~/.autojump/bin
   • ln ~/.autojump/etc/profile.d/autojump.sh ~/.autojump/bin/autojump
   • chmod +x ~/.autojump/bin/autojump

8. This doesn't work.
   • I notice that ~/.local/share/autojump/autojump.txt isn't being updated when I change directories.
   • If I enter j [something], every time I get an error, e.g.

$ j bin
autojump: directory 'bin' not found
\n\n
Try `autojump --help` for more information.

Unfortunately, autojump --help doesn't help, because it does absolutely nothing.

Where is the documentation that explains how to use install.py, please? For example, I can figure out what --dryrun means, and #36 explains what --prefix means, but the other ones are difficult to unravel — there are no comments at all in install.py, I don't know Python, and I can't find the relevant documentation.

Anyway, I don't know what to do now. I'm stuck. This is obviously a bug, but until it's fixed, how can I work around it?

Thank you