This tutorial explains how you can install nload directly from source code on macOS. Tested on macOS 10.9.5.

Installing nload via official source code archive.

First grab a compressed archive from an official nload source site:

curl -O -L http://www.roland-riegel.de/nload/nload-0.7.4.tar.gz

Next, decompress the archive like this:

tar -xf nload-0.*.tar.gz

Now go into the decompressed directory:

cd nload-0.*

Once in that directory, open configure.in to modify it for macOS (Darwin) use:

nano configure.in

Look for the line that has *bsd* in it like this:

*bsd*)

And change that *bsd* to be *darwin* (aka: macOS) like this:

*darwin*)

After that’s done, find this line:

test "$enableval" = "no" && LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS -s",

And change it to remove the -s like this:

test "$enableval" = "no" && LDFLAGS="$LDFLAGS",

Close and save that file and now load this other file:

nano src/devreader-bsd.cpp

Look for this line:

interfaceNames.push_back(string(sdl->sdl_data));

And change it to:

interfaceNames.push_back(string(sdl->sdl_data).substr(0, sdl->sdl_nlen));

Save that file and now run run_autotools:

./run_autotools

Run this configure command:

./configure --disable-debug --disable-dependency-tracking

Once the configure process completes, run make:

make

Finally install it by running sudo make install:

sudo make install

And once it’s installed, run the command with --version to do a simple check to see it’s working:

nload --help

Response should be something like this:

nload version 0.7.4

Uninstall if you need to:

sudo make uninstall