2.5 Command line options for debugging

Finally, there are several options for aiding in debugging m4 scripts.

-d[flags]

--debug[=flags]

Set the debug-level according to the flags flags. The debug-level controls the format and amount of information presented by the debugging functions. See section Controlling debugging output, for more details on the format and meaning of flags. If omitted, flags defaults to ‘aeq’.

--debugfile[=file]

-o file

--error-output=file

Redirect dumpdef output, debug messages, and trace output to the named file. Warnings, error messages, and errprint output are still printed to standard error. If these options are not used, or if file is unspecified (only possible for ‘--debugfile’), debug output goes to standard error; if file is the empty string, debug output is discarded. See section Saving debugging output, for more details. The option ‘--debugfile’ may be given more than once, and order is significant with respect to file names. The spellings ‘-o’ and ‘--error-output’ are misleading and inconsistent with other GNU tools; for now they are silently accepted as synonyms of ‘--debugfile’ and only recognized once, but in a future version of M4, using them will cause a warning to be issued.

-l num

--arglength=num

Restrict the size of the output generated by macro tracing to num characters per trace line. If unspecified or zero, output is unlimited. See section Controlling debugging output, for more details.

-t name

--trace=name

This enables tracing for the macro name, at any point where it is defined. name need not be defined when this option is given. This option may be given more than once, and order is significant with respect to file names. See section Tracing macro calls, for more details.