Error Installing Gnuplot on Mac OS X – ld: symbol(s) not found

This morning I was trying to install Gnuplot from source because I wanted generate some graphs for ApacheBench. I’m currently benchmarking one of our Rails applications using Nginx w/ Mongrels against Phusion Passenger (Nginx flavor). When “make”ing Gnuplot I received the following error:

Undefined symbols:
“_rl_ding”, referenced from:
_alert in mouse.o
“_rl_complete_with_tilde_expansion”, referenced from:
_main in plot.o
“_history_list”, referenced from:
_write_history_list in history.o
“_rl_reset_after_signal”, referenced from:
_main in plot.o
ld: symbol(s) not found
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[3]: *** [gnuplot] Error 1
make[2]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make[1]: *** [all-recursive] Error 1
make: *** [all] Error 2

After reading a comment here I found out that the -–with-readline=builtin option needs to be include when configuring Gnuplot. So you should run the following before “make”ing:

./configure -–with-readline=builtin

That got me going and hopefully it will do the same for you!