diff --git a/utils/extractsources b/utils/extractsources
new file mode 100755
index 00000000000..29da433c873
--- /dev/null
+++ b/utils/extractsources
@@ -0,0 +1,88 @@
+#!/usr/bin/perl
+# extractsources: pull out lists of _SOURCES from Makefile.am into files
+
+#   Copyright (C) 2005 by ott
+#   Part of the Battle for Wesnoth Project http://wesnoth.org/
+#
+#   This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
+#   it under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
+#   This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
+#   but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY.
+#
+#   See the COPYING file for more details.
+
+# This script takes as input a Makefile.am containing _SOURCES variable
+# assignments.  It extracts the lists of files in each such assignment
+# and creates a file for each list.
+# Conditional semantics of the Makefile.am are not dealt with, so the last
+# occurrence of each _SOURCES variable will be used, whether inside a
+# conditional or not.
+
+use strict;
+use File::Basename;
+
+my $DEBUG = 0;
+my $filename;
+
+sub process_arg {
+    my $path = shift;
+    my $out = shift;
+    my $arg = shift;
+    my $outfile = $path . $out;
+    $DEBUG and print STDERR "argument :$arg:\n";
+    $DEBUG and print STDERR "opening $outfile for writing\n";
+    if (! open(OUTFILE, ">$outfile")) {
+        warn "Can't open $outfile for writing, skipping";
+	return;
+    }
+    $arg =~ s/\\\n/\n/g;
+    $arg =~ s/\s+/\n/g;
+    $arg =~ s/\n+/\n/g;
+    $arg =~ s/^\n+//s;
+    $DEBUG and print STDERR "argument now :$arg:\n";
+    print OUTFILE $arg;
+    close OUTFILE;
+}
+
+Argument:
+while ($filename = shift) {
+    $DEBUG and print STDERR "opening $filename for reading\n";
+    if (! open(CURRENT, $filename)) {
+        warn("cannot open file $filename, skipping");
+        next Argument;
+    }
+    my ($base,$path,$type) = fileparse($filename, qr{\.am});
+    if ($type ne '.am') {
+	warn "Can only process files ending with .am, skipping $filename";
+	next Argument;
+    }
+
+    my $out;
+    my $state = 0;
+    my $arg = '';
+    while (<CURRENT>) {                                                         
+	if ($state == 0) {
+	    if ( /^(\w+)_SOURCES\s*=\s*(.*)/s ) {
+		$out = "$1_sources";
+		$arg = $2;
+		# chomp $arg;
+		if ( $arg =~ /\\$/ ) {
+		    $state = 1;
+		} else {
+		    process_arg( $path, $out, $arg );
+		}
+	    } # else keep looking
+	} elsif ($state == 1) { # looking for more lines
+	    $arg .= $_;
+	    if ( ! /\\$/ ) { # got the whole SOURCES line, substitute
+		process_arg( $path, $out, $arg );
+		$arg = '';
+		$out = '';
+		$state = 0;
+	    }
+	} else {
+	    die 'Internal error, quitting';
+	}
+    }
+    process_arg( $path, $out, $arg ) if $arg;
+}