M4

NAME
SYNOPSIS
DESCRIPTION
AUTHOR
REPORTING BUGS
COPYRIGHT
SEE ALSO

NAME

M4 - macro processor

SYNOPSIS

m4 [OPTION]... [FILE]...

DESCRIPTION

Process macros in FILEs. If no FILE or if FILE is ‘-’, standard input is read.

Mandatory or optional arguments to long options are mandatory or optional for short options too.

Operation modes:

--help

display this help and exit

--version

output version information and exit

-E, --fatal-warnings

stop execution after first warning

-i, --interactive

unbuffer output, ignore interrupts

-P, --prefix-builtins

force a ‘m4_’ prefix to all builtins

-Q, --quiet, --silent

suppress some warnings for builtins

Preprocessor features:
-D, --define=NAME[=VALUE]

define NAME as having VALUE, or empty

-I, --include=DIRECTORY

append DIRECTORY to include path

-s, --synclines

generate ‘#line NUM "FILE"’ lines

-U, --undefine=NAME

undefine NAME

Limits control:
-G, --traditional

suppress all GNU extensions

-H, --hashsize=PRIME

set symbol lookup hash table size [509]

-L, --nesting-limit=NUMBER

change artificial nesting limit [1024]

Frozen state files:
-F, --freeze-state=FILE

produce a frozen state on FILE at end

-R, --reload-state=FILE

reload a frozen state from FILE at start

Debugging:
-d, --debug[=FLAGS]

set debug level (no FLAGS implies ‘aeq’)

--debugfile=FILE

redirect debug and trace output

-l, --arglength=NUM

restrict macro tracing size

-t, --trace=NAME

trace NAME when it is defined

FLAGS is any of:

	a		show actual arguments
	c		show before collect, after collect and after call
	e		show expansion
	f		say current input file name
	i		show changes in input files
	l		say current input line number
	p		show results of path searches
	q		quote values as necessary, with a or e flag
	t		trace for all macro calls, not only traceon’ed
	x		add a unique macro call id, useful with c flag
	V		shorthand for all of the above flags

If defined, the environment variable ‘M4PATH’ is a colon-separated list of directories included after any specified by ‘-I’.

Exit status is 0 for success, 1 for failure, 63 for frozen file version mismatch, or whatever value was passed to the m4exit macro.

AUTHOR

Written by Rene’ Seindal.

REPORTING BUGS

Report bugs to <bug-m4@gnu.org>.