Recently, I’ve been exploring mobile forensics and I wanted to install Scalpel on my new Mac however, I encountered a few difficulties along the way. These steps seemed to resolve my issues so I thought I’d share what I did.

Download Scalpel from-

https://github.com/sleuthkit/scalpel

Unzip the file and navigate to the root of the folder. At this point, I attempted to run ./bootstrap however, this failed.

Part of the issue seems to be that under newer versions of Xcode, (around version 4.4.1 onwards), Apple doesn’t include Autoconf, Automake, and Libtool.

This link http://jsdelfino.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/autoconf-and-automake-on-mac-os-x.html shows a manual way of installing these tools, although there’s an easier way….

If you have Macports installed-

sudo port install autoconf
sudo port install automake
sudo port install libtool

Note- choose automake rather than automake17

Following this, the machine should now be ready to install Scalpel-

sudo ./bootstrap
sudo ./configure 
sudo make install