Welcome to Ledger the command-line accounting program Introduction ============ Ledger is an accounting program which is invoked from the command-line using a textual ledger file. To start using Ledger, you will need to create such a file containing your financial postings. A sample has been provided in the file "sample.dat". See the documentation (ledger.pdf, or ledger.info) for full documentation on creating a ledger file and using Ledger to generate reports. Once you have such a file -- you might call it "ledger.dat" -- you can start looking at balances and account registers using commands like the following: ledger -f ledger.dat balance assets:checking ledger -f ledger.dat register expenses:food This assumes, of course, that like the sample file you use account names such as "Assets:Checking" and "Expenses:Food". If you use other account names, you will need to vary the reporting commands you use accordingly. Building ======== To build Ledger, you will need a fairly modern C++ compiler (gcc 2.95 will not work), and at least these two libraries installed: gmp GNU multi-precision library pcre Perl regular expression library (On some GNU/Linux systems, the packages you need to install are called "gmp-dev" and "pcre-dev"). Once you have determined where the headers and libraries for the above packages are installed, run the script "configure", passing those paths. If you installed everything under /usr/local, you can probably just type "./configure". Otherwise, do this: ./configure CPPFLAGS=-I LDFLAGS=-L If you need to specify multiple include or library paths, then do this: ./configure CPPFLAGS="-I -I" LDFLAGS="-L -L" Once configure is done running, just type: make install Mailing List and IRC ==================== If you need help on how to use Ledger, or run into problems, you can join the Ledger mailing list at the following Web address: http://groups.google.com/group/ledger-cli You can also find help at the #ledger channel on the IRC server irc.freenode.net.