File: autoconf.info,  Node: Customizing autom4te,  Prev: autom4te Invocation,  Up: Using autom4te

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 (*note 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"