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 autom4te Invocation) 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"