Prepare Diffutils to be compiled: LDFLAGS="-static" CPPFLAGS=-Dre_max_failures=re_max_failures2 \     ./configure --prefix=$LFS/static --disable-nls The meaning of the configure options are: LDFLAGS="-static": This is the most common way to tell a package that all programs should be statically linked. This way the LDFLAGS environment variable is set but only in the subshell that the configure script runs in. When configure is done its job, the LDFLAGS variable won't exist anymore. CPPFLAGS=-Dre_max_failures=re_max_failures2: The CPPFLAGS variable is a variable that's read by the cpp program (C PreProcessor). The value of this variable tells the preprocessor to replace every instance of re_max_failures it finds with re_max_failures2 before handing the source file to the compiler itself for compilation. This package has problems linking statically on systems that run an older Glibc version and this construction fixes that problem. Finish off by compiling and installing the package: make make install