GNU Automake For Linux

GNU Automake is a completely free, easy-to-use, flexible and open source command-line software project that has been designed from the offset to automatically generate Makefile.in for GNU/Linux programs.

The software relies on the Autoconf program, which is usually used on GNU/Linux systems to generate configure scripts for applications. The Makefile.in files created with GNU Automake are compliant with the GNU coding standards.

GNU Automake is a power tool for all GNU/Linux operating systems, meaning that it is extremely essential if you plan to compile programs from source packages, as it creates the Makefile for compiling the program, after Autoconf creates the configuration file.

It is usually available for installation in the main software repositories of modern GNU/Linux distributions, but you can also install the latest version by compiling its source package, which is distributed for free on Softpedia.

Simply download and save the source package on your computer, using the dedicated download section above, extract its contents using an archive manager utility, and open a terminal emulator application.

Move to the location of the extracted archive files in the Terminal app (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/automake-1.15), run the ‘./configure && make’ command to configure and compile GNU Automake, and install it system wide by running the ‘sudo make install’ command.

Like any other command-line program, GNU Automake includes various command-line options, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘automake --help’ command in a terminal emulator after installing it using the above instructions.

Among these, we can mention the ability to enable or disable dependency tracking code, to set strictness to foreign, gnits or gnu, to add missing standard files to a package, to set the directory that stores the library files, to copy missing files, or to force update the standard files.