AC_SUBST_FILE does look appealing. My changes were initially only going to affect aclocal.m4 and config/post.in. I will finish my work in my fashion - and will examine the use of AC_SUBST_FILE - can one guarantee that the order of inclusion of files. I also believe substitutions will not be made to the included files (which would be nice). It would mean that we might need to generate config/pre.in with all the substitutions - and then the rest of the files. I guess this could be considered phase II. Ezra