Libtool uses a number of macros to interrogate the host system when it is being built, and you can use some of them yourself too. Although there are a great many other macros in the libtool installed m4 files, these do not form part of the published interface, and are subject to change between releases.
Macros in the ‘LT_CMD_’ namespace check for various shell commands:
Finds the longest command line that can be safely passed to ‘$SHELL’ without being truncated, and store in the shell variable ‘$max_cmd_len’. It is only an approximate value, but command lines of this length or shorter are guaranteed not to be truncated.
Macros in the ‘LT_FUNC_’ namespace check characteristics of library functions:
‘AC_DEFINE’ the preprocessor symbol ‘DLSYM_USCORE’ if we have to add an underscore to symbol-names passed in to ‘dlsym’.
Macros in the ‘LT_LIB_’ namespace check characteristics of system libraries:
Set ‘LIBM’ to the math library or libraries required on this machine, if any.
This is the macro used by ‘libltdl’ to determine what dlloaders to use on this machine, if any. Several shell variables are set (and ‘AC_SUBST’ed) depending on the dlload interfaces are available on this machine. ‘LT_DLLOADERS’ contains a list of libtool libraries that can be used, and if necessary also sets ‘LIBADD_DLOPEN’ if additional system libraries are required by the ‘dlopen’ loader, and ‘LIBADD_SHL_LOAD’ if additional system libraries are required by the ‘shl_load’ loader, respectively. Finally some symbols are set in config.h depending on the loaders that are found to work: ‘HAVE_LIBDL’, ‘HAVE_SHL_LOAD’, ‘HAVE_DYLD’, ‘HAVE_DLD’.
Macros in the ‘LT_PATH_’ namespace search the system for the full path to particular system commands:
Add a --with-gnu-ld option to configure. Try to find
the path to the linker used by ‘$CC’, and whether it is the
GNU linker. The result is stored in the shell variable
‘$LD’, which is AC_SUBST
ed.
Try to find a BSD-compatible nm
or a MS-compatible
dumpbin
command on this machine. The result is stored in the
shell variable ‘$NM’, which is AC_SUBST
ed.
Macros in the ‘LT_SYS_’ namespace probe for system characteristics:
Tests whether a program can dlopen itself, and then also whether the same program can still dlopen itself when statically linked. Results are stored in the shell variables ‘$enable_dlopen_self’ and ‘enable_dlopen_self_static’ respectively.
Define the preprocessor symbol ‘LTDL_DLOPEN_DEPLIBS’ if the OS needs help to load dependent libraries for ‘dlopen’ (or equivalent).
Define the preprocessor symbol ‘LT_DLSEARCH_PATH’ to the system default library search path.
Define the preprocessor symbol ‘LT_MODULE_EXT’ to the extension used for runtime loadable modules. If you use libltdl to open modules, then you can simply use the libtool library extension, .la.
Define the preprocessor symbol ‘LT_MODULE_PATH_VAR’ to the name of the shell environment variable that determines the run-time module search path.
Set the shell variable ‘sys_symbol_underscore’ to ‘no’ unless the compiler prefixes global symbols with an underscore.