Fixing m4 on MAC OS 10.14.5

Question

I'm having an issue with pecl which is erring out saying phpize had failed.

The problem ultimately seems to be with m4. Error is autom4te: need GNU m4 1.4 or later: /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/m4

When I run "which m4" I get /Applications/MAMP/Library/bin/m4

However, any command I try to run with m4 like "m4 --version" I get the following:

Abort trap: 6

I can't find a good explanation of that error, but I'm guessing something is corrupted with m4, but I can't figure out how to fix this on a Mac. Do I just download a newer version and run configure, make and make install? Just a little nervous since I have somewhat limit Mac experience.

Answer 1

There seems to be an issue with M4 not being included in Xcode 15. For me it prompts to download an update, but this never fixes the issue.

You can then install m4 with brew.

Assuming you have installed m4 with brew you can run

brew info m4

It will tell you:

If you need to have m4 first in your PATH, run: echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/m4/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

echo 'export PATH="/opt/homebrew/opt/m4/bin:$PATH"' >> ~/.zshrc

setting the brew version of m4 to be first in my path resolved the issue for me.