Executing autoconf
Running autoconf is simple: Just execute it in the same directory as your configure.ac file. While I could do this for each example in this chapter, I'm going to use the autoreconf program instead of the autoconf program, because running autoreconf has exactly the same effect as running autoconf, except that autoreconf will also do the right thing when you start adding Automake and Libtool functionality to your build system. That is, it will execute all of the Autotools in the right order based on the contents of your configure.ac file.
autoreconf is smart enough to only execute the tools you need, in the order you need them, with the options you want (with one caveat that I'll mention shortly). Therefore, running autoreconf ...
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