AutoGen Reference Manual

AutoGen is a tool designed to simplify the creation and maintenance of programs that contain large amounts of repetitious text. It is especially valuable in programs that have several blocks of text that must be kept synchronized.

AutoGen will accept either its own definition format, or XML files as definition input, in addition to CGI data (for producing dynamic HTML) and traditional AutoGen definitions.

A common example where this would be useful is in creating and maintaining the code required for processing program options. Processing options requires multiple constructs to be maintained in parallel in different places in your program. Options maintenance needs to be done countless times. So, AutoGen comes with an add-on package named AutoOpts that simplifies the maintenance and documentation of program options.

AutoGen is known to work on GNU/Linux, BSD, Apple’s OS/X, SVR4-5, HPUX, SCO OpenServer and Solaris. It is expected that it will work on any reasonably modern UNIX system with an ANSI-compliant C compiler. It also runs under WinNT, provided you have CygWin and Guile loaded.