Quote: Original post by Codeka
There are two ways (that I know of, there's probably more [wink]) to separate commands in the shell. ";" and "&&" so "cd foo ; cd bar" executes the "cd foo" command followed by the "cd bar" command. Using "&&" instead means "if the first command fails, don't execute the rest".

There is another one:

A ; B

-> Will execute commands in sequence.

A && B

-> Will execute command B if A was succesful.

A || B

-> Will execute command B if A was unsuccesful.

Quote: Original post by icecubeflower
What if I wasn't using a fancy IDE? What if I was using jpico? Suppose I had open like four terminal windows. In one I'm writing my program with jpico and hitting <ctrl>-O all the time to save. In another terminal I'm in the same directory typing "make" over and over. Say I've been making up my own simple makefile that works on my computer. But now my massive project is nearing completion and I want people on other systems to be able to do the whole ./configure, make, make install thing on their own computers where my makefile might not work.

How would I go about creating a configure.in? What do the pros do? Or do they all use a fancy IDE?

The pros use [g]vim and create configure.ac from scratch. Ok, some apostates use emacs. The source "configure.in" was deprecated some time ago.

Actually, I generally do the following when setting up a new project.

(1) Create a basic directory structure
$(top_srcdir)
$(top_srcdir)/src
$(top_srcdir)/config

(2) Add a basic src/main.cpp, just to get started
(3) Create a basic Makefile.am with just a SUBDIRS=src line and an empty src/Makefile.am
(4) Run "autoscan", rename configure.scan to configure.ac
(5) Edit configure.ac to add AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE and update to modern autoconf standards (different AC_INIT syntax etc.) -- something like this.

(6) Create a shell script autogen.sh with the following contents

(7) git init; git add *; git commit -sm "Initial checkin"
(8) ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make && lather-rinse-repeat

It gets a little more complicated if you want to use libtool. You need to add AC_PROG_LIBTOOL to configure.ac.

This is a start. You will probably want to expand your horizons by learning autoconf programming so you can create and use macros to autodetect the presence and location of dependant software (eg. SDL libs). That's a whole nother topic.