The binary executables for Ninja 1.9.0 may not work on Red Hat 7 due to incompatible libc. The symptom of this is messages like:

$ ninja

ninja: /lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.21' not found (required by ninja)
ninja: /lib64/libstdc++.so.6: version `GLIBCXX_3.4.20' not found (required by ninja)

This was a known issue with the Ninja release artifact build process that was fixed.

Workaround: if a current version of Ninja is not available, use Ninja 1.8.2. This may work for other “older” Linux distros.