A thing that I'm going to describe is nowhere difficult, however it's not very obvious and actually I was pretty surprised that I only managed to think about it after so many years working with autotools.
From time to time I find myself needing to re-run the configure script because I either need to add or remove some option or just run it with sh -x for debugging purposes or with scan-build for example.
Usually I have a number of arguments and environment variables defined and I don't keep that in my head. I just hit ctrl-r and find the last execution of configure with all the stuff included and continue with that. But if I don't touch it for some time then it goes away from the HISTFILE. In that case I have to go the config.log file and copy/paste stuff from there. However, copy/pasting sucks and, moreover, it doesn't have proper quotes.
Apparently, there's a better solution for that: the config.status can provide everything that's needed.
$ ./config.status --config '--with-hal' '--without-uml' '--without-polkit' 'CFLAGS=-g -I/usr/local/include' 'LDFLAGS=-L/usr/local/lib' $
For example, to re-run all the same using scan-build just do:
$ eval scan-build ./configure `./config.status --config`
So it's pretty neat.
More info on the config.status scripts is available in its official documentation.
