Hi! I fell on this while writing a macro wrapping AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS. This is 2.69. I have not seen indications in the documentation that the first argument must be 'a literal'.
$ cat configure.ac AC_INIT AC_CONFIG_COMMANDS([m4_default([], [foo])], [echo foo]) AC_OUTPUT $ autoconf $ ./configure configure: creating ./config.status ./config.status: line 510: syntax error near unexpected token `CONFIG_COMMANDS="$CONFIG_COMMANDS "' ./config.status: line 510: ` "" CONFIG_COMMANDS="$CONFIG_COMMANDS " ;;' config.status looks like this: 506 # Handling of arguments. 507 for ac_config_target in $ac_config_targets 508 do 509 case $ac_config_target in 510 "" CONFIG_COMMANDS="$CONFIG_COMMANDS " ;; 511 "foo") CONFIG_COMMANDS="$CONFIG_COMMANDS foo)" ;; 512 513 *) as_fn_error $? "invalid argument: \`$ac_config_target'" "$LINENO" 5;; 514 esac 515 done I guess the other AC_CONFIG_* have the same issue. Cheers!