CODEWITHSUNDEEP
macosm4
sclamons
sclamons

Reputation: 73

Updating m4 on mac OS X 10.6.8

I'm trying to upgrade m4 from version 1.4.6 (the version that comes with OS X 10.6.8) to 1.4.16. I've installed with homebrew, and I've also built from source into /usr/local/ (and edited /etc/paths to put /usr/local above /usr), but the system version still seems to take precedence.

Specifically, if I type m4 --version', I getGNU M4 1.4.6 , but if I type/usr/local/bin/m4 --versoin, I getm4 (GNU M4) 1.4.16 `. How do I set the new version as the default version?

...ultimately, I'd like to update autoconf and automake. Is there anything else I should know about installing them?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2419

Answers (1)

William Pursell
William Pursell

Reputation: 212404

When you type just m4 at the prompt, your shell looks through the PATH variable to locate the command. You just need to prepend /usr/local/bin to your path. For example, in ~/.bashrc, you can simply do:

PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Note that this may lead to the directory appearing multiple times in the PATH. You can avoid that with something like:

echo $PATH | tr : \\n | grep -q '^/usr/local/bin$' || PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH

Upvotes: 1

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