GNU Automake is a software development tool to automate parts of the compilation process.

It is used to build several GNU applications and libraries, such as GTK,[3] as well as non-GNU software such as XCircuit.

In simple cases, it suffices to give: Automake also takes care of automatically generating the dependency information,[5] so that when a source file is modified, the next invocation of the make command will know which source files need to be recompiled.

[2] Automake contains the following commands: aclocal, however, is a general-purpose program that can be useful to autoconf users.

The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC), for example, uses aclocal even though its makefile is hand written.