If anyone has been lamenting the loss of the bash-static package, this evening i took the time to figure out how to create something that works just as well. I peeked in the Makefile for bash on an older version of OpenBSD to see how the static version differs. The difference is when compiling bash the CONFIGURE_ENV variable needs to be set. The full steps i used to build a bash-static package were: First install the ports tarball from the install CD. You will also need to have the compilers install set installed (it is by default). Then: # cd /usr/ports/shells/bash # make print-build-depends This will print a list of dependencies. Install them from packages. You could also compile them from ports, but why when other people have already done the excellent work of providing the packages? # export CONFIGURE_ENV="LDFLAGS=-static" # make package That's it! The new bash package will be in /usr/ports/packages/i386/all (of course, "i386" will be different for other platforms). It won't have "-static" in the name, but you can always rename the file before installing on other systems if you really want.