8.2.2 Customizing autom4te

One can customize autom4te via ‘~/.autom4te.cfg’ (i.e., as found in the user home directory), and ‘./.autom4te.cfg’ (i.e., as found in the directory from which autom4te is run). The order is first reading ‘autom4te.cfg’, then ‘~/.autom4te.cfg’, then ‘./.autom4te.cfg’, and finally the command line arguments.

In these text files, comments are introduced with #, and empty lines are ignored. Customization is performed on a per-language basis, wrapped in between a ‘begin-language: "language"’, ‘end-language: "language"’ pair.

Customizing a language stands for appending options (see section Invoking autom4te) to the current definition of the language. Options, and more generally arguments, are introduced by ‘args: arguments’. You may use the traditional shell syntax to quote the arguments.

As an example, to disable Autoconf caches (‘autom4te.cache’) globally, include the following lines in ‘~/.autom4te.cfg’:

## ------------------ ##
## User Preferences.  ##
## ------------------ ##

begin-language: "Autoconf-without-aclocal-m4"
args: --no-cache
end-language: "Autoconf-without-aclocal-m4"