6.3.1 aclocal Options

aclocal accepts the following options:

--automake-acdir=dir

Look for the automake-provided macro files in dir instead of in the installation directory. This is typically used for debugging.

--system-acdir=dir

Look for the system-wide third-party macro files (and the special ‘dirlist’ file) in dir instead of in the installation directory. This is typically used for debugging.

--diff[=command]

Run command on M4 file that would be installed or overwritten by ‘--install’. The default command is ‘diff -u’. This option implies ‘--install’ and ‘--dry-run’.

--dry-run

Do not actually overwrite (or create) ‘aclocal.m4’ and M4 files installed by ‘--install’.

--help

Print a summary of the command line options and exit.

-I dir

Add the directory dir to the list of directories searched for ‘.m4’ files.

--install

Install system-wide third-party macros into the first directory specified with ‘-I dir’ instead of copying them in the output file. Note that this will happen also if dir is an absolute path.

When this option is used, and only when this option is used, aclocal will also honor ‘#serial number’ lines that appear in macros: an M4 file is ignored if there exists another M4 file with the same basename and a greater serial number in the search path (see section Serial Numbers).

--force

Always overwrite the output file. The default is to overwrite the output file only when really needed, i.e., when its contents changes or if one of its dependencies is younger.

This option forces the update of ‘aclocal.m4’ (or the file specified with ‘--output’ below) and only this file, it has absolutely no influence on files that may need to be installed by ‘--install’.

--output=file

Cause the output to be put into file instead of ‘aclocal.m4’.

--print-ac-dir

Prints the name of the directory that aclocal will search to find third-party ‘.m4’ files. When this option is given, normal processing is suppressed. This option was used in the past by third-party packages to determine where to install ‘.m4’ macro files, but this usage is today discouraged, since it causes ‘$(prefix)’ not to be thoroughly honoured (which violates the GNU Coding Standards), and a similar semantics can be better obtained with the ACLOCAL_PATH environment variable; see section Writing your own aclocal macros.

--verbose

Print the names of the files it examines.

--version

Print the version number of Automake and exit.

-W CATEGORY

--warnings=category

Output warnings falling in category. category can be one of:

syntax

dubious syntactic constructs, underquoted macros, unused macros, etc.

unsupported

unknown macros

all

all the warnings, this is the default

none

turn off all the warnings

error

treat warnings as errors

All warnings are output by default.

The environment variable WARNINGS is honored in the same way as it is for automake (see section Creating a ‘Makefile.in’).

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