Home · Extensions · .m4

`.m4`

2 claimants 2 primary 0 secondary shared primary (2)

SWH popularity

From the SWH-MSR-ARV dataset (Desmazières, Di Cosmo, Lorentz, MSR 2025; file nb_extensions_alphanum.csv) — one row per (ext, year) in the full SWH archive. Case-aggregated. citation.

733.3K

total occurrences

104.0K

since 2019 (14.2%)

1969–2023

years active

Case variants in archive: .m4 (733.1K), .M4 (136) — aggregated above.

Attribution status

This extension is attributed to m4; m4sugar as primary by 2 authoritative claims.

Authoritative sources: ✓ Linguist ✗ Pygments · no claim ✗ Wikidata · no claim ✗ Wikipedia · no claim

Disagree or have a correction? Open a labelling issue.

Claimants (2)

Languages that list .m4 among their extensions. Strength reflects whether the upstream source treated it as their primary extension.

Language	Source	Strength
m4	linguist	primary
m4sugar	linguist	primary

Wikidata says… (1)

File formats, image formats, audio codecs and other non-PL entities that claim .m4 on Wikidata (property P1195) or in the Wikipedia infobox. Source: data/derived/external_extension_index.csv. Click Use as new PL on any row to open the Add-PL form pre-filled with that entry's name, Wikipedia/Wikidata URL, and this extension — one submission creates the PL + claim.

Right entry isn't listed? Add manually ↗

Format	Class (Wikidata `P31`)	Suggested label	MIME	Notes	Action
m4 preprocessor / macro source Q105863732 file format	file format	—	`—`	—	Use as new PL ↗

Disambiguation rules (2)

Linguist heuristics that decide, by content, which language a .m4 file actually is.

Rule	Predicts	Kind	Predicates (truncated)
`h/linguist/.m4/0`	m4sugar	predicates	`[{"kind": "any", "regexes": ["AC_DEFUN\|AC_PREREQ\|AC_INIT", "^_?m4_"]}]`
`h/linguist/.m4/1`	m4	default	`[]`

SWH-mined examples (1)

Real archived programs with this extension, byte-verified against the SWH archive. Useful for deciding what this extension actually is when the attribution is uncertain.

ad_encode.m4 · 3561 B · seen 4702× in SWH

predicted: m4 via default-rule

swh:1:cnt:e6c87cf5b0559c2058e1ba0dc1d796438c987047;origin=https://github.com/corretto/corretto-17;anchor=swh:1:rev:ef0f693065eddd5c86b9e0fc52d57eafb0b1dc50;path=/src/hotspot/cpu/aarch64/ad_encode.m4

Open in SWH · Raw bytes