autotools

I'm using a 64bit system but want a set of 32bit binaries. What options must I pass to a configure script to generate a 32bit/x86 makefile? Passing the following argument to configure script allowed me to build the 32bit library on 64bit Linux ./configure --build=i686-pc-linux-gnu "CFLAGS=-m32" "CXXFLAGS=-m32" "LDFLAGS=-m32" Jack's answer is incomplete. You need compiler/libc support for 32-bit compilation. In some distros like Ubuntu, what you need to do is install packages gcc-multilib and/or g++-multilib : sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib g++-multilib Then you can call configure as you

Anyone recommend how a person could get started with autotools in building a C project? Follow the autotools tutorial . You can also get the autobook . Chapter 4 covers a minimal GNU autotools project. Alexandre Duret-Lutz 's tutorial is my resource of choice. There are also: Autotools: a practitioner's guide to Autoconf, Automake and Libtool Autotools Mythbuster To me, the autobook is not up to date anymore and more difficult to read. However it still contains interesting chapters like Writing Portable Bourne Shell . Also, consider learning about non-recursive automake which addresses the

These two files are mostly seen in open source projects. What are they for, and how do they work? Sean A.O. Harney Makefile.am is a programmer-defined file and is used by automake to generate the Makefile.in file (the .am stands for a uto m ake). The configure script typically seen in source tarballs will use the Makefile.in to generate a Makefile . The configure script itself is generated from a programmer-defined file named either configure.ac or configure.in (deprecated). I prefer .ac (for a uto c onf) since it differentiates it from the generated Makefile.in files and that way I can have

I have a program, myprogram , which is linked with a static convenience library, call it libconvenience.a , which contains a function, func() . The function func() isn't called anywhere in myprogram ; it needs to be able to be called from a plugin library, plugin.so . The symbol func() is not getting exported dynamically in myprogram . If I run nm myprogram | grep func I get nothing. However, it isn't missing from libconvenience.a : nm libconvenience/libconvenience.a | grep func 00000000 T func I am using automake, but if I do the last linking step by hand on the command line instead, it doesn

I want to run 'make install' so I have everything I need, but I'd like it to install the things in their own folder as opposed to the system's /usr/bin etc. is that possible? even if it references tools in the /usr/bin etc.? It depends on the package. If the Makefile is generated by GNU autotools ( ./configure ) you can usually set the target location like so: ./configure --prefix=/somewhere/else/than/usr/local If the Makefile is not generated by autotools, but distributed along with the software, simply open it up in an editor and change it. The install target directory is probably defined in

I understand that CFLAGS (or CXXFLAGS for C++) are for the compiler, whereas CPPFLAGS is used by the preprocessor. But I still don't understand the difference. I need to specify an include path for a header file that is included with #include -- because #include is a preprocessor directive, is the preprocessor (CPPFLAGS) the only thing I care about? Under what circumstances do I need to give the compiler an extra include path? In general, if the preprocessor finds and includes needed header files, why does it ever need to be told about extra include directories? What use is CFLAGS at all? (In