I read this: Makefile: Copying files with a rule but couldn't do it.
To make it simple, suppose I have two directories dir1 and dir2. Under dir1 I have three files: rabbit.c, tiger.c and bus.c .
I made Makefile like this:
dir2/rabbit.c:dir1/rabbit.c
dir2/tiger.c:dir1/tiger.c
dir2/bike.c:dir1/bike.c
dir2/%:
cp -f $< $#
I specified the prerequisites in three separate lines and specified the unified recipe for the three targets. I expected when I touch any file under dir1, make will copy that file to dir2. But this happend only for rabbit.c. What is wrong?
ADD(after selecting an answer) :
After realizing what's wrong by Takkat's answer, I fixed it and later modified it further and I think this is the correct simplest Makefile for this case.
.PHONY:all
LIST:=rabbit.c tiger.c bike.c
DSTFILES:=$(addprefix dir2/, $(LIST))
all: $(DSTFILES)
dir2/%:dir1/%
cp -f $< $#
Make chooses a default target in your makefile and, unless you specify differently on the command line, it builds just that target (and all prerequisites required to build that target).
The default target in a makefile is, by default, the first explicit target listed.
So in your makefile the first rule is:
dir2/rabbit.c:dir1/rabbit.c
so the first explicit target is dir2/rabbit.c, so that's all make builds.
If you want to build multiple targets by default, you need a first target that lists all the "real" targets as prerequisites; put this line first in your makefile:
all: dir2/rabbit.c dir2/tiger.c dir2/bike.c
and it will work. It's often considered good practice to declare targets like this, which don't relate to real files on the disk, as phony:
.PHONY: all
Related
I'm using Automake.
I have a few source files listed in dist_man1_MANS like this:
dist_man1_MANS = some-file.1 some-other-file.1
Now, Automake + configure eventually generate this in Makefile:
dist_man1_MANS = some-file.1 some-other-file.1
# ...
install-man1: $(dist_man1_MANS)
# generated recipe here
Since I'm not prefixing the .1 files with $(srcdir), I assume that, since I run make from the build directory (its current working directory), it should find them in the build directory.
So, I'm doing an out-of-tree build, for example, in /tmp/build:
/path/to/src/configure --prefix=$(pwd)/install
make
make install
and the build succeeds, that is, make finds the man pages and installs them. They are not in the build directory, however. I add this to the generated Makefile:
install-man1: $(dist_man1_MANS)
#echo ">>> $(^)"
#echo "::: $(dist_man1_MANS)"
# generated recipe here
Now, I would assume that both echos print the same thing, because $^ means the names of all the prerequisites, with spaces between them. To my surprise, the output is:
>>> /path/to/src/some-file.1 /path/to/src/some-other-file.1
::: some-file.1 some-other-file.1
So:
How did make find the /path/to/src/ prefix exactly? Where does it come from in this very context?
Why do $^ and $(dist_man1_MANS) differ?
I found the answer.
Automake sets the VPATH variable in its generated Makefile, a special variable for make, to something like:
VPATH = /path/to/src
From the previous links:
4.5.1 VPATH: Search Path for All Prerequisites
The value of the make variable VPATH specifies a list of directories that make should search. Most often, the directories are expected to contain prerequisite files that are not in the current directory; however, make uses VPATH as a search list for both prerequisites and targets of rules.
So make searches for the some-file.1 and some-other-file.1 prerequisites in the current working directory first, then for /path/to/src/some-file.1 and /path/to/src/some-other-file.1 if it cannot find the first ones. In this case I understand why $^ is different from $(dist_man1_MANS): $^ is the list of effective (resolved) prerequisites.
I have a very bizzare problem with GNU make. I have the following files:
a/x.html
b/Makefile
b/c/Makefile
The contents of a/x.html are irrelevant. The contents of b/Makefile are as follows:
SRC=../a
all: x.html
%.html: ${SRC}/%.html
rsync $< $#
The contents of b/c/Makefile are the same, except for the definition of SRC:
SRC=../../a
If I run make in b/c/ the result is as expected:
rsync ../../a/x.html x.html
and x.html gets copied from a/ to b/c/.
However, if I run make in b/ the output I get is several lines of:
make: stat: ../a/../a/.. (repeated many times) ../a/x.html: File name too long
It seems that make is applying the rule for %.html recursively, but why? Is there something obvious I am missing?
To build a target that matches the pattern %.html (i.e. any target name that ends in .html), make applies the rule if it can build the dependency (target built from the original target with ../a/ prepended).
You ask to build x.html. This matches the pattern %.html, so the rule applies: make sees if it can build ../a/x.html.
../a/x.html matches the pattern %.html, so the rule applies: make sees if it can build ../a/../a/x.html.
../../a/x.html matches the pattern %.html, so the rule applies, etc.
The stem character can match any part of a path, including directory separators.
You can see what make is trying by running make -r -d (-d to show debugging output, -r to turn off built-in rules which would cause a huge amount of noise).
When you're in b/c, this stops at step 2 because ../../a/x.html exists but ../../../../a/x.html doesn't.
One way to fix this is to list the files on which you want to act. You can build that list from the list of files that already exist in ../a:
$(notdir $(wildcard ${SRC}/*.html)): %.html: ${SRC}/%.html
rsync $< $#
This has the downside that if the HTML files in ../a are themselves built by a rule in b/Makefile, then running make in b won't built them in a pristine source directory. This shouldn't be a problem though: it would be unusual to have a makefile in b build things outside b.
Another approach which doesn't have this defect is to use an absolute path.
%.html: $(abspath ${SRC})/%.html
rsync $< $#
This question is based on another question of mine here: Getting basename and notdir to work in prerequisite (dependency) list.
I'm using a Makefile to generate some figures automatically and
efficiently.
My figures are generated in ../thesis/figures using Octave .m
files that are in the current directory where the Makefile also is.
Each .m file, e.g. figure1.m, may generate several figures, e.g.
figure1.p1.tex and figure1.p2.tex (and their dependecies, which
are also generated by figure1.m). These .tex files are then to be compiled using LaTeX (a single run of pdflatex figure1.p1.tex suffices in this case; so, there is no need for latexmk or other alternatives).
The Makefile I have so far is
OCTAVE = octave --jit-compiler --no-gui --quiet
PDFLATEX = pdflatex
FIGDIR = ../thesis/figures
TEXTARGETS = $(wildcard $(FIGDIR)/*.tex)
.PHONY: figures
figures: $(TEXTARGETS)
.SECONDEXPANSION:
$(TEXTARGETS): %.tex : $$(basename $$(notdir %)).m
$(OCTAVE) $<
$(PDFLATEX) $#
A dry run with make -n shows me
octave --jit-compiler --no-gui --quiet figure1.m
pdflatex ../thesis/figures/figure1.p1.tex
octave --jit-compiler --no-gui --quiet figure1.m
pdflatex ../thesis/figures/figure1.p2.tex
make: *** No rule to make target `figure2.m', needed by `../thesis/figures/figure2.tex'. Stop.
There are two issues here:
1) Both figure1.p1.tex and figure.p2.tex are generated by the first run of figure1.m by octave. Is there a way to treat all targets with the same basename (or other pattern) as a prerequisite as one, so that there is no more than one invocation of octave per .m file?
2) figure2.tex was made using some other means than an .m file. How can I tell make to ignore a rule if its prerequisite does not exist. I know how to do that for an explicit prerequisite:
target: prereq
recipe
prereq:
But what to do in this case with the prerequisite being derived from the target's name?
GNU make can be taught that multiple targets are created by one command invocation by using a pattern rule for those targets.
From Pattern Rule Examples:
This pattern rule has two targets:
%.tab.c %.tab.h: %.y
bison -d $<
This tells make that the recipe ‘bison -d x.y’ will make both x.tab.c and x.tab.h. If the file foo depends on the files parse.tab.o and scan.o and the file scan.o depends on the file parse.tab.h, when parse.y is changed, the recipe ‘bison -d parse.y’ will be executed only once, and the prerequisites of both parse.tab.o and scan.o will be satisfied. (Presumably the file parse.tab.o will be recompiled from parse.tab.c and the file scan.o from scan.c, while foo is linked from parse.tab.o, scan.o, and its other prerequisites, and it will execute happily ever after.)
So you could use something like
figure1.%1.tex figure1.%2.tex: figure1.m
$(OCTAVE) $<
but to do that for N output files where N is variable would require generating an included makefile that pulled that information out of the .m file (or similar).
If a file exists that matches a target but no matching prerequisite file is found make will just use the file it found and ignore the rule (the rule doesn't apply). You shouldn't have to do anything for that.
If, however, the file would otherwise match the rule (but you don't want make to follow the rule for that file) then you can cancel just that application by giving that file an explicit target. Like this.
figure2.tex: ;
I'm trying to make a rule that will generate files regarding their names but regardless of the directory.
I'm starting from this makefile (see a previous question of mine):
TARGETS:=$(patsubst %_tpl,%,$(wildcard *_tpl))
.PHONY: all
all: $(TARGETS)
.SECONDEXPANSION:
$(TARGETS): %: $$(wildcard %*_tpl)
./generate $#_tpl > $#
With this, I can do, for instance, make foo.xml. It looks if a set of foo.xml*_tpl files are there, consider them as prerequisites and call the generate script to generate the target.
What I would like to do is, for example, make ../ressources/foo.xml and have make use the rule to create foo.xml but creating it in the ../ressources/ directory, without having to explicitely specify this directory in the makefile.
What I have tried for the moment is adding this to the Makefile:
../ressources/%: $(notdir %)
mv $< $#
Which works, but I would like to avoid creating the file in the current directory before moving it to the destination folder. I would also like not having to specify the possible destination folders in the makefile (but this is less important).
But first of all, does this make any sense? Or is what I want to do just conceptually wrong?
EDIT: Some precisions regarding the _tpl files and the generate script to avoid confusions:
Each target has a main template ($#_tpl) that includes others ($#-part1_tpl, $#-part2_tpl...) and the generate script only takes the main template as argument. The templates are written with Jinja2 (the subparts included with the {% include %} jinja directive).
If you always want the targets in another directory, just say so.
TARGETS:=$(patsubst %_tpl,../resources/%,$(wildcard *_tpl))
.PHONY: all
all: $(TARGETS)
.SECONDEXPANSION:
$(TARGETS): ../resources/%: $$(wildcard %*_tpl)
./generate $#_tpl > $#
I'm not sure if you should have generate $^ >$# instead; superficially, this would make more sense.
If there are multiple *_tpl files for each target (i.e. there are more tpl files than xml files), the TARGETS definition isn't really correct; but we don't have enough information to actually fix it.
On the other hand, if the target directory can change a lot, the sane way forward might be to cd into the target directory and use make -f ../path/to/Makefile -- just make sure your VPATH is set up so that the source files can be found.
When I change a Makefile, its rules may have changed, so they should be reevaluated, but make doesn't seem to think so.
Is there any way to say, in a Makefile, that all of its targets, no matter which, depend on the Makefile itself?
(Regardless of its name.)
I'm using GNU make.
This looks like one more simple, useful, logical thing that Make should be able to do, but isn't.
Here is a workaround. If the clean rule is set up correctly, Make can execute it whenever the makefile has been altered, using an empty dummy file as a marker.
-include dummy
dummy: Makefile
#touch $#
#$(MAKE) -s clean
This will work for most targets, that is targets that are actual files and that are removed by clean, and any targets that depend on them. Side-effect targets and some PHONY targets will slip through the net.
Since GNU make version 4.3 it is now possible with the use of those two special variable:
.EXTRA_PREREQS
To add new prerequisite to every target
MAKEFILE_LIST
To get the path of the make file
To have every target depend on the current make file:
Put near the top of the file (before any include since it would affect the MAKEFILE_LIST) the following line:
.EXTRA_PREREQS:= $(abspath $(lastword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)))
To have every target depend on the current make file and also the make files which were included
Put the following line at the end of your file:
.EXTRA_PREREQS+=$(foreach mk, ${MAKEFILE_LIST},$(abspath ${mk}))
The only answer I know to this is to add makefile explicitly to the dependencies. For example,
%.o: %.c makefile
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) -c $<