Hi Vincent, So, if the subdirectories may not be writable, how can the rm in the first example work without changing the permissions first?
[namely:] dist-hook: rm -rf `find $(distdir)/doc -type d -name .svn` That example belongs to the preceding paragraph (Occasionally it is useful to be able to change the distribution ...) not the following paragraph that you quoted. Also, not that I wrote any of this, but it seems to me that the pervasive assumption is that the automake user in fact owns the file trees in question. Thus rm -rf should work even if it's mode zero. Of course it won't work on a read-only source tree, but, well, it's just an example ... --thanks, karl.