Chapter 20. GNU M4

M4 is a general-purpose tool for processing text and has existed on Unix systems of all kinds for many years, rarely catching the attention of users. Text generation through macro processing is not a new concept. Originally M4 was designed as the preprocessor for the Rational Fortran system and was influenced by the General Purpose Macro generator (GPM), first described by Stratchey in 1965! GNU M4 is the GNU project's implementation of M4 and was written by Rene Seindal in 1990.

In recent years, awareness of M4 has grown through its use by popular free software packages. The Sendmail package incorporates a configuration system that uses M4 to generate its complex 'sendmail.cf' file from a simple specification of the desired ...

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