4.2. Generated Output Files

By studying the diagram in Appendix C, you can see which commands must be run to generate the required output files from the input files shown in the preceding section.

First, we generate 'configure':

$ aclocal
$ autoconf

Because 'configure.in' contains macro invocations that are not known to Autoconf itself—AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE being a case in point—it is necessary to collect all the macro definitions for Autoconf to use when generating 'configure'. This is done using the aclocal program, so called because it generates 'aclocal.m4' (see Appendix C). If you were to examine the contents of 'aclocal.m4', you would find the definition of the AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE macro contained within.

After running autoconf, you will find ...

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