GNU Autoconf, Automake and Libtool

New Riders graciously indulged our principles, and published this book under the terms of the Open Publication License (with none of the options exercised). Consequently the content of the book is truly free, and you can download the html of the onlne version for reading offline, either as a zip archive (860k) or a gzipped tar archive (352k).

If you like this book, then please consider buying a bound and printed copy, so that the authors can continue to write free documentation, and to support the GNU Project (almost 10% of the total royalties from sales of the book are donated to the Free Software Foundation, who maintain the tools discussed in the book).

Examples from the Book

A theme running through the book is the continued development of the `Sic' project, which is introduced early on and used to show a practical application of the techniques described in preceding chapters. `Sic' becomes a skeletal Unix shell by the end of the book, and is infact still under continued development on sourceforge.

Note that the chapter numbers given here correspond to the paper edition of the book, which are off by one compared to the online edition.

When the paper version of the book was written, the contemporary versions of the Autotools we used are now considered ancient. If you wish to follow the examples in the paper version of the book closely, then you should ensure that you have the following versions of the tools installed:

Since then, the online version of the book is slowly being updated to a more recent set of Autotools, currently:

In some of the downloads below, two versions are offered; the first is for use with the ancient Autotools described in the paper version of the book; the other, where given, is an updated example that will work with modern Autotools - and eventually will match the text in the online version of the book.

Chapter 4 A Minimal GNU Autotools Project: Just about the smallest Autoconf and Automake project that is possible, while still illustrating a reasonable number of features of the tools, for the paper edition or for modern Autotools.
Chapter 7 A Small GNU Autotools Project: A very simple first cut at `Sic', using only basic Autoconf and Automake features, for the paper edition or for modern Autotools.
Chapter 9 Introducing GNU Libtool: A straight forward illustration of some of the features of Libtool, for the paper edition or for modern Autotools.
Chapter 10 Using GNU Libtool with `configure.in' and `Makefile.am': Examples of creating and using a libtool convenience library, for the paper edition or for modern Autotools.
Chapter 11 A Large GNU Autotools Project: Taking advantage of Libtool with the `Sic' project, large-1.1.
Chapter 16 Dynamic Loading: A basic dlopen() based dynamic loader, dlopen-1.1.
Chapter 17 Using GNU libltdl: A better dynamic loader using GNU libltdl (as shipped with Libtool), ltdl-1.0.
Chapter 19 A Complex GNU Autotools Project: Adding a libltdl module loader to `Sic', complex-1.0.
Chapter 21 Writing Portable Bourne Shell: The functional shell reexecutor, shell-1.0.
Chapter 24 Using Autotools with Cygnus' Cygwin: Various techniques to help your project work with Cygwin, cygwin-1.0.

Download

Read the Book Offline

Examples from the Book