Little things learned

It is sort of strange that watch didn't appear on my unix radar so far. watch runs an arbitrary command and optinally highlights the differences to the previous run in its output. Try e.g.

watch --interval=1 --differences date

to see what i mean.

When using the autotools stack you have to call aclocal, autoconf, automake etc. in the right order and with the right options to create a working configure script. Often you see an autogen.sh script for this in projects (including stuff like my ndbapi examples), but there is actually an easier way for all this. Just run autoreconf and have it figure out from your configure.in etc. which of the autotools to run, in which order and with which options.

Initially you need to run it with -i or --install to request any missing files to be created, later on you can just invoke it without options to recreate configure and friends.

This is example output from an autoreconf run:

$ autoreconf --verbose --install
autoreconf: Entering directory `.'
autoreconf: configure.in: not using Gettext
autoreconf: running: aclocal
autoreconf: configure.in: tracing
autoreconf: running: libtoolize --copy
autoreconf: running: /usr/bin/autoconf
autoreconf: running: /usr/bin/autoheader
autoreconf: running: automake --add-missing --copy --no-force
configure.in: installing `./install-sh'
configure.in: installing `./missing'
Makefile.am: installing `./depcomp'
autoreconf: Leaving directory `.'

As you can see it figures out all necessary steps just fine, no need to have an autogen.sh script around anymore.