Many of the files in this directory are taken from the fileutils, shellutils, and textutils packages. These files are used by a program called aclocal (part of the GNU automake package). aclocal uses these files to create aclocal.m4 which is in turn used by autoconf to create the configure script at the top level in this distribution. The Makefile.am file in this directory is automatically generated from the template file, Makefile.am.in.