Trying to understand why make is failing - makefile

I can't use this Makefile to compile "balance_test" ...
FLAGS=-g
OBJS=balance.o balance_drv.o
SRCS=$(OBJS:.o=.F90)
balance_test: $(OBJS)
gfortran $(FLAGS) -o $# $(OBJS)
balance.mod : balance.o
balance.o : balance.F90
balance_drv.o: balance_drv.F90 balance.mod
clean:
rm balance_test *.o *.mod
.SUFFIXES : .F90 .o
.F90.o :
gfortran -c $(FLAGS) $^
... because make thinks that balance.o depends on balance.mod, and so it thinks there is a circular dependency. (balance_drv.o does depend on balance.mod because balance_drv.F90 uses module balance, by the way.)
I fixed this by specifying the compile statement specifically for balance.o and balance_drv.o. But I would like to know what exactly I am misunderstanding about suffix rules, because I don't want it to bite me when I have a much bigger Makefile to write.

There is a suffix rule of the form
%.o : %.mod
...
Your rule:
.SUFFIXES : .F90 .o
adds (or reiterates) two suffixes, but it does not disable the other suffix rules. To do that, add one more rule:
.SUFFIXES :
.SUFFIXES : .F90 .o

Related

Adding additional dependencies for all files with a given extension

Let's say I am using the implicit rule to build an .o file from a .c file.
If I want to add a specific additional dependency for one particular .o file, it is as easy as adding a rule without a recipe:
file.o : header.h
This makes file.o depend on header.h in addition to file.c.
What if I want to do that for all .o files? The following doesn't work:
%.o : header.h
For this to make sense, header.h must a header that is (and has to be) included by every .c file
and is hence a prerequisite of every .o file. If that is your situation you
need to write your own pattern rule, like:
%.o: %.c header.h
$(CC) $(CPPFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $#
But the usual approach to managing header file dependencies is Auto-Dependency Generation
Later
My goal was to avoid duplicating the existing implicit rule (the recipe part) for $(CC) compilation. Is that possible?
You have to define a new pattern rule that adds header.h to the %.c prerequisite,
and has the appropriate recipe. In fact I ought
to have advised you also to cancel the builtin pattern rule:
%.o: %.c
%.o: %.c header.h
$(CC) $(CPPFLAGS) $(CFLAGS) -c $< -o $#

Forcing the order of implicit rule/pattern rule evaluation in GNU Make

I have a domain specific language compiler (homemade) which takes a file x.inflow and generates two files: x.c and x.h. The C file is compiled in the conventional manner and the generated header file has to be included into any file that calls the functions defined within it.
The header files therefore have to be generated before any C files that use them are compiled. My current Makefile, below, works fine except for the first build from clean where it can try and compile main.c before the header file that it includes has been created.
NAME = simplest
OBJ = $(patsubst %.c,%.o,$(wildcard *.c)) \
$(patsubst %.inflow,%.o,$(wildcard *.inflow))
CC = gcc
CFLAGS = -g -Wall
$(NAME): $(OBJ)
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $# $^ $(CLIBS)
# Dependencies for existing .o files.
-include $(OBJ:.o=.d)
# Compile an inflow file into both a .c and .h file.
# Note that this rule has two targets.
%.c %.h: %.inflow
inflow $<
# Compile object files and generate dependency information.
%.o: %.c
$(CC) -MD -MP -c $(CFLAGS) -o $# $<
Obviously, I can fix this for specific cases by adding, for example (where simplest.h is a generated header):
main.o: simplest.h
But is there a general way to force one type of pattern rule (%.c %.h: %.inflow) to be run before any invokations of another (%.o: %.c)?
Well, you can force any target to be run before any other target with order-only prerequisites. So for example, you can write:
%.o : %.c | simplest.h
$(CC) -MD -MP -c $(CFLAGS) -o $# $<
which will ensure that no target that uses this pattern rule to build will be invoked before the target simplest.h is created. However, I don't think you can put patterns in an order-only prerequisite. To be honest, I've never tried it so it's possible that it works, I'm not sure.
If not, you could just list all the order-only prerequisites in the %.o pattern rule; this would ensure that all the inflow files are generated before any of the object files are built. That's probably OK.
It seems the problem is twofold:
Make doesn't know that it needs to generate simplest.h before compiling main.c.
You don't want to have to explicitly tell Make about the dependency (and remember to update it when it changes).
Rather than force Make to evaluate rules in a set order, you can solve your problem by letting Make create the dependencies for you. Check out this section of the Gnu Make manual: http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Automatic-Prerequisites
When you run Make, it will scan your source files and gather their dependencies for you (and you won't have to explicitly list that main.o depends on simplest.h).

Makefile - Pattern Rule as a dependency

I've ha makefile with following entries. Will the first rule depend on the secon rule ? So that it builds all the .o files from second files ?
all:$(PROG)
$(PROG): *.o
$(LD) -o $(PROG) -c $< $(LFLAGS)
%.o : %.c
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -o $# -c $<
To be specific if i invoke 'make all' will it invoke the second rule if no *.o files were found ?
All other Variables have usual meaning .
No, that will not work. When you run your makefile for the first time, are there any .o files? No. So the expression *.o will expand to nothing.
Of course, your recipe for $(PROG) doesn't actually use any of the object files anyway, as written.
You can do something like this (although personally I prefer to simply list the files out by hand; it's not very common to create all new files so it's not much effort, and it's safer than just trying to grab every file in the directory):
SOURCES := $(wildcard *.c)
OBJECTS := $(SOURCES:%.c=%.o)
$(PROG): $(OBJECTS)

Passing target name to a dependency in makefile

If I have the following rule in a makefile:
$(OBJ)/%.o: $(SRC)/%.c
$(CC) -c -o $# $< $(CFLAGS)
Every file matching the prefix ./obj/ and sufix .o will have its stem passed to %, so I can provide some dependencies based on its name.
But, suppose I have this kind of rule, which I specify one by one the targets I want:
OBJECTS=abc.o bca.o cba.o
$(OBJECTS): $(SRC)/%.c
$(CC) -c -o $# $< $(CFLAGS)
How do I make the % stem actually work for the current target name make is executing? Just using % doesn't work, neither $#.
Note that I'm trying to write the actual target name to its own dependency. For example, when make is executing the rule for abc.o, it would include $(SRC)/abc.c and just it (something like $(patsubst %.o, $(SRC)/%.c, MAGIC_TARGET_NAME_VARIABLE)).
You can just replace this rule:
$(OBJECTS): $(SRC)/%.c
with:
$(OBJECTS) : %.o : $(SRC)/%.c
You will need to add the $(OBJ) to the -o part of the recipe if you still want them built there:
$(OBJECTS) : %.o : $(SRC)/%.c
$(CC) -c -o $(OBJ)/$# $< $(CFLAGS)
I’m not completely clear on what you’re asking, but I think this accomplishes what you’re trying to do:
OBJECTS=abc.o bca.o cba.o
.PHONY: all
all: $(OBJECTS:%=obj/%)
$(OBJ)/%.o: $(SRC)/%.c
echo $(CC) -c -o $# $< $(CFLAGS)
All .o files are built; each .o file is built using only the .c file corresponding to it; and if you want to refer to the list of all object files or source files in the command for compiling a .o file, then you can reference ${OBJECTS} directly.
If this isn’t what you’re trying to do, you’ll be able to get a better answer by listing the input files you have, the output files you want to make, the input dependencies of each output file, and what compilation command you want to execute for each output file.

How to write a simpler makefile for a lot of single-c-file programmes?

I want to write a lot of tiny example programmes for one same library, each needs gcc $(OtherOpt) -o xxx -lthelibname xxx.c.
How to write a Makefile without dozens of tagret lines ?
Pattern rules are your friend for these situations. As long as your targets all match a predictable pattern -- and they do in this case, as they are all of the form "create foo from foo.c" -- you can write a single pattern rule that will be used for all of the targets:
OtherOpt=-Wall -g
all: $(patsubst %.c,%,$(wildcard *.c))
%: %.c
gcc $(OtherOpt) -o $# -lthelibname $<
Now you can either run simply make to build all your apps, or make appname to build a specific app. Here I've created a single pattern rule that will be used anytime you want to create something from something.c. I used the $# automatic variable, which will expand to the name of the output, and the $< variable, which will expand to the name of the first prerequisite, so that the command-line is correct regardless of the specific app being built. Technically you don't need the all line, but I figured you probably didn't want to always have to type in the name(s) of the apps you want to build.
Also, technically you can probably get away without having any of this makefile, because GNU make already has a built-in pattern rule for the %: %.c relationship! I mention this option only for completeness; personally, I prefer doing things the way I've shown here because it's a little bit more explicit what's going on.
%.o: %.c
gcc $(OtherOpt) -c -o $# -lthelibname $<
That compiles all .c files to their .o files (object code) of the same base name. Then in your actual target(s), you would include all necessary .o files as dependencies and use gcc $(OtherOpt) -o $# $^ -lthelibname, assuming I'm not misunderstanding how your build is set up.
Some versions of make also support the suffix rule .c.o to be ALMOST the same thing as %.o: %.c, but the suffix rules can't have any dependencies. Writing .c.o: foo.h tells make to compile "foo.h" to "foo.c.o" rather than requiring "foo.h" as a dependency of any file with a .c suffix as %.o: %.c foo.h would correctly do.
I learnd from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gcmakefile/
LDLIB = -lpthread
LDFLAGS = -Wl,-O1 -Wl,--sort-common -Wl,--enable-new-dtags -Wl,--hash-style=both $(LDLIB)
SRCDIRS =
SRCEXTS = .c .C .cc .cpp .CPP .c++ .cxx .cp
CFLAGS = -pipe -march=core2 -mtune=generic -Wfloat-equal \
#-Wall -pedantic
ifeq ($(SRCDIRS),)
SRCDIRS = .
endif
SOURCES = $(foreach d,$(SRCDIRS),$(wildcard $(addprefix $(d)/*,$(SRCEXTS))))
TARGET = $(addprefix bin/,$(basename $(SOURCES)))
all: $(TARGET)
ls -l $(TARGET)
bin/%: %.c dir
gcc $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) -o $# $<
dir:
#-mkdir bin
.PHONY : clean
clean:
-rm $(TARGET)
-rmdir bin

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