Putting All The Pieces Together

Combining all of the steps from the previous slides results in a file that is often called autogen.sh.

This file just runs the various autotools programs in an appropriate order. To wit, it is essentially

#!/bin/sh

aclocal
autoheader
automake --add-missing
autoconf

In practice, this file usually includes checks for the correct versions of programs. It may also run things like autopoint (from the gettext package) and other preliminary scripts.

The above fragment is the essence of the procedure, though, and is the portion we are concerned about in this tutorial.