GNU M4, version 1.4.17
A powerful macro processor
Edition 1.4.17, 22 September 2013
by René Seindal, François Pinard,Gary V. Vaughan, and Eric Blake
(bug-m4@gnu.org)
This manual (22 September 2013) is for GNU M4 (version 1.4.17), a package containing an implementation of the m4 macro language.
Copyright © 1989-1994, 2004-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”
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GNU M4
This manual (22 September 2013) is for GNU M4 (version 1.4.17), a package containing an implementation of the m4 macro language.
Copyright © 1989-1994, 2004-2013 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.3 or any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of the license is included in the section entitled “GNU Free Documentation License.”
GNU m4
is an implementation of the traditional UNIX macro
processor. It is mostly SVR4 compatible, although it has some
extensions (for example, handling more than 9 positional parameters
to macros). m4
also has builtin functions for including
files, running shell commands, doing arithmetic, etc. Autoconf needs
GNU m4
for generating ‘configure’ scripts, but not for
running them.
GNU m4
was originally written by René Seindal, with
subsequent changes by François Pinard and other volunteers
on the Internet. All names and email addresses can be found in the
files ‘m4-1.4.17/AUTHORS’ and
‘m4-1.4.17/THANKS’ from the GNU M4
distribution.
This is release 1.4.17. It is now considered stable: future releases in the 1.4.x series are only meant to fix bugs, increase speed, or improve documentation. However…
An experimental feature, which would improve m4
usefulness,
allows for changing the syntax for what is a word in m4
.
You should use:
./configure --enable-changeword
if you want this feature compiled in. The current implementation
slows down m4
considerably and is hardly acceptable. In the
future, m4
2.0 will come with a different set of new features
that provide similar capabilities, but without the inefficiencies, so
changeword will go away and you should not count on it.
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