I have a makefile from which i am trying to invoke an executable, the executable needs 5 arguments, how do i pass these arguments from makefile
doing this does not works
run-exe:
arg1 = "somevalue"
arg2 = "somevalue"
arg3 = "somevalue"
arg4 = "somevalue"
arg5 = "somevalue"
$(ExeFolderPath)/Task $(arg1) $(arg2) $(arg3) $(arg4) $(arg5)
the arguments are getting ignored.
The commands in a makefile recipe are executed by the shell, not by Make, and each line is executed in a new shell subprocess, so variables defined on previous lines are no longer defined after that line (unless you use .ONESHELL as shown in this answer).
So you cannot set Make variables there, and then use them like $(arg1) later. You need to set shell variables (with no space around the =) and refer to them using shell variable syntax, i.e. $arg1 or ${arg1}, but you need to escape the $ signs so that Make doesn't try to interpret them itself, i.e. use $$arg1 or $${arg1}.
With your attempt you are trying to refer to Make variables called $(arg1) and $(arg2) but those were never defined in the Makefile, so they expand to nothing, and no arguments are passed.
Furthermore, each line of the make recipe is executed in a separate shell process, so the way you wrote it, make creates a new shell subprocess, sets arg1="somevalue" and then that shell process exits (so the variable definition is lost). Then it starts a new shell, sets another variable, then exits that shell etc.
Setting the variables and using them needs to happen in a single shell process, which can be done using .ONESHELL if you are using GNU Make version 3.82 or later. For other versions of Make, another way to ensure that the variable definitions and the uses are all in the same shell process is to put them all on one line:
run-exe:
arg1="somevalue" ; arg2="somevalue" ; arg3="somevalue" ; arg4="somevalue" ; arg5="somevalue" ; $(ExeFolderPath)/Task $$arg1 $$arg2 $$arg3 $$arg4 $$arg5
But this is hard to read, so you can keep them on separate lines but use backslashes so that make still treats them as a single line and runs them in the same shell process:
run-exe:
arg1="somevalue" ; \
arg2="somevalue" ; \
arg3="somevalue" ; \
arg4="somevalue" ; \
arg5="somevalue" ; \
$(ExeFolderPath)/Task $$arg1 $$arg2 $$arg3 $$arg4 $$arg5
Each line in the recipe of the run-exe rule runs in a different shell instance. So, if you set a variable in one line, that assignment won't have any effect for the next line, because that next line runs in a new shell instance.
You can however keep your approach by defining the .ONESHELL-target in order to get all the lines (commands) of a recipe executed in a single shell:
.ONESHELL:
run-exe:
arg1="somevalue"
arg2="somevalue"
arg3="somevalue"
arg4="somevalue"
arg5="somevalue"
$(ExeFolderPath)/Task $$arg1 $$arg2 $$arg3 $$arg4 $$arg5
Note that there shouldn't be spaces around the =, since those variable assignment are run by the shell, not make.
Also note that the $ should be escaped for the shell variables (i.e.: $$ instead of $).
You are going to need GNU Make 3.82 (or newer) in order to use .ONESHELL.
Related
I noticed that my script was ignoring my positional arguments in old terminal tabs, but working on recently created ones, so I decided to reduce it to the following:
TAG=test
while getopts 't:' c
do
case $c in
t)
TAG=$OPTARG
;;
esac
done
echo $TAG
And running the script I have:
~ source my_script
test
~ source my_script -t "test2"
test2
~ source my_script -t "test2"
test
I thought it could be that c was an special used variable elsewhere but after changing it to other names I had the exact same problem. I also tried adding a .sh extension to the file to see it that was a problem, but nothing worked.
Am I doing something wrong ? And why does it work the first time, but not the subsequent attempts ?
I am on MacOS and I use zsh.
Thank you very much.
The problem is that you're using source to run the script (the . command does the same thing). This makes it run in your current (interactive) shell (rather than a subprocess, like scripts normally do). This means it uses the same variables as the current shell, which is necessary if you want it to change those variables, but it can also have weird effects if you're not careful.
In this case, the problem is that getopts uses the variable OPTIND to keep track of where it is in the argument list (so it doesn't process the same argument twice). The first time you run the script with -t test2, getopts processes those arguments, and leaves OPTIND set to 3 (meaning that it's already done the first two arguments, "-t" and "test2". The second time you run it with options, it sees that OPTIND is set to 3, so it thinks it's already processed both arguments and just exits the loop.
One option is to add unset OPTIND before the while getopts loop, to reset the count and make it start from the beginning each time.
But unless there's some reason for this script to run in the current shell, it'd be better to make it a standard shell script and have it run as a subprocess. To do this:
Add a "shebang" line as the first line of the script. To make the script run in bash, that'd be either #!/bin/bash or #!/usr/bin/env bash. For zsh, use #!/bin/zsh or #!/usr/bin/env zsh. Since the script runs in a separate shell process, the you can run bash scripts from zsh or zsh scripts from bash, or whatever.
Add execute permission to the script file with chmod -x my_script (or whatever the file's actual name is).
Run the script with ./my_script (note the lack of a space between . and /), or by giving the full path to the script, or by putting the script in some directory in your PATH (the directories that're automatically searched for commands) and just running my_script. Do NOT run it with the bash, sh, zsh etc commands; these override the shebang and therefore can cause confusion.
Note: adding ".sh" to the filename is not recommended; it does nothing useful, and makes the script less convenient to run since you have to type in the extension every time you run it.
Also, a couple of recommendations: there are a bunch of all-caps variable names with special meanings (like PATH and OPTIND), so unless you want one of those special meanings, it's best to use lower- or mixed-case variable names (e.g. tag instead of TAG). Also, double-quoting variable references (e.g. echo "$tag" instead of echo $tag) avoids a lot of weird parsing headaches. Run your scripts through shellcheck.net; it's good at spotting common mistakes like this.
This question already has an answer here:
command substitution doesn't work with echo in makefile [duplicate]
(1 answer)
Closed 6 years ago.
Inside of a makefile, I'm trying to check if fileA was modified more recently than fileB. Using a few prior posts (this and this) as references, I've come up with this as an attempt to store the time since last file modification as a variable:
(I'd rather this be in a function outside of a make recipe, but one step at a time.)
.PHONY: all clean
all : (stuff happens here)
radio :
BASE_MOD_TIME="$( expr $(date +%s) - $(date +%s -r src/radio_interface/profile_init.c) )"
#echo "$(BASE_MOD_TIME)"
I thought that I would be assigning the output of the expr command to a variable, BASE_MOD_TIME, but the output is:
bash-4.1$
BASE_MOD_TIME=""
echo ""
What am I doing wrong here? Simple attempts to save the output of ls -l also didn't work like this.
Make variables are normally global, and you don't normally set make variables in a recipe. A recipe is simply a list of commands to be executed by a shell, and so what looks like a variable assignment in a recipe is a shell variable assignment.
However, each line in a make recipe is run in its own shell subprocess. So a variable set in one line won't be visible in another line; they are not persistent. That makes setting shell variables in recipes less useful. [Note 1]
But you can combine multiple lines of a recipe into a single shell command using the backslash escape at the end of the line, and remembering to terminate the individual commands with semicolons (or, better, link them with &&), because the backslash-escaped newline will not be passed to the shell. Also, don't forget to escape the $ characters so they will be passed to the shell, rather than being interpreted by make.
So you could do the following:
radio:
#BASE_MOD_TIME="$$( expr $$(date +%s) - $$(date +%s -r src/radio_interface/profile_init.c) )"; \
echo "$$BASE_MOD_TIME"; \
# More commands in the same subprocess
But that gets quite awkward if there are more than a couple of commands, and a better solution is usually to write a shell script and invoke it from the recipe (although that means that the Makefile is no longer self-contained.)
Gnu make provides two ways to set make variables in a recipe:
1. Target-specific variables.
You can create a target-specific variable (which is not exactly local to the target) by adding a line like:
target: var := value
To set the variable from a shell command, use the shell function:
target: var := $(shell ....)
This variable will be available in the target recipe and all dependencies triggered by the target. Note that a dependency is only evaluated once, so if it could be triggered by a different target, the target-specific variable might or might not be available in the dependency, depending on the order in which make resolves dependencies.
2. Using the eval function
Since the expansion of recipes is always deferred, you can use the eval function inside a recipe to defer the assignment of a make variable. The eval function can be placed pretty well anywhere in a recipe because its value is the empty string. However, evaling a variable assignment makes the variable assignment global; it will be visible throughout the makefile, but its value in other recipes will depend, again, on the order in which make evaluates recipes, which is not necessarily predictable.
For example:
radio:
$(eval var = $(shell ...))
Notes:
You can change this behaviour using the .ONESHELL: pseudo-target, but that will apply to the entire Makefile; there is no way to mark a single recipe as being executed in a single subprocess. Since changing the behaviour can break recipes in unexpected ways, I don't usually recommend this feature.
What's wrong with this?
fileB: fileA
#echo $< was modified more recently than $#
Instead of forcing the makefile to do all of the heavy lifting via some bash commands, I just called a separate bash script. This provided a lot more clarity for a newbie to bash scripting like myself since I didn't have to worry about escaping the current shell being used by make.
Final solution:
.PHONY: all clean
all : (stuff happens here)
radio :
./radio_init_check.sh
$(MKDIR_P) $(OBJDIR)
make $(radio_10)
with radio_init_check.sh being my sew script.
I'm trying to access a variable declared by previous command (inside a Makefile).
Here's the Makefile:
all:
./script1.sh
./script2.sh
Here's the script declaring the variable I want to access,script1.sh:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
myVar=1234
Here's the script trying to access the variable previously defined, script2.sh:
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo $myVar
Unfortunately when I run make, myVar isn't accessible. Is there an other way around? Thanks.
Make will run each shell command in its own shell. And when the shell exits, its environment is lost.
If you want variables from one script to be available in the next, there are constructs which will do this. For example:
all:
( . ./script1.sh; ./script2.sh )
This causes Make to launch a single shell to handle both scripts.
Note also that you will need to export the variable in order for it to be visible in the second script; unexported variables are available only to the local script, and not to subshells that it launches.
UPDATE (per Kusalananda's comment):
If you want your shell commands to populate MAKE variables instead of merely environment variables, you may have options that depend on the version of Make that you are running. For example, in BSD make and GNU make, you can use "variable assignment modifiers" including (from the BSD make man page):
!= Expand the value and pass it to the shell for execution and
assign the result to the variable. Any newlines in the result
are replaced with spaces.
Thus, with BSD make and GNU make, you could do this:
$ cat Makefile
foo!= . ./script1.sh; ./script2.sh
all:
#echo "foo=${foo}"
$
$ cat script1.sh
export test=bar
$
$ cat script2.sh
#!/usr/bin/env bash
echo "$test"
$
$ make
foo=bar
$
Note that script1.sh does not include any shebang because it's being sourced, and is therefore running in the calling shell, whatever that is. That makes the shebang line merely a comment. If you're on a system where the default shell is POSIX but not bash (like Ubuntu, Solaris, FreeBSD, etc), this should still work because POSIX shells should all understand the concept of exporting variables.
The two separate invocations of the scripts create two separate environments. The first script sets a variable in its environment and exits (the environment is lost). The second script does not have that variable in its environment, so it outputs an empty string.
You can not have environment variables pass between environments other than between the environments of a parent shell to its child shell (not the other way around). The variables passed over into the child shell are only those that the parent shell has export-ed. So, if the first script invoked the second script, the value would be outputted (if it was export-ed in the first script).
In a shell, you would source the first file to set the variables therein in the current environment (and then export them!). However, in Makefiles it's a bit trickier since there's no convenient source command.
Instead you may want to read this StackOverflow question.
EDIT in light of #ghoti's answer: #ghoti has a good solution, but I'll leave my answer in here as it explains a bit more verbosely about environment variables and what we can do and not do with them with regards to passing them between environments.
I have this interpreter, which prints the ARGS variable:
#!/bin/bash
echo "[$ARGS]"
I use this interpreter in another script:
#!/usr/bin/env ARGS=first interpreter
Calling the second script, I get
[first]
How do I get
[first second]
?
The short of it: don't rely on being able to pass multiple arguments as part of a shebang line, and the one argument you can use must be an unquoted, single word.
For more background information, see the question #tholu has already linked to in a comment (https://stackoverflow.com/a/4304187/45375).
Thus, I suggest you rewrite your other script to use bash as well:
#!/bin/bash
ARGS='first second' /usr/bin/env interpreter "$#"
This allows you to use bash's own mechanism for defining environment variables ad-hoc (for the command invoked and its children) by prefixing commands with variable assignments, allowing you to use quoting and even define multiple variables.
Whatever command-line arguments were passed in are passed through to interpreter via "$#".
This won't work for me. I want to make some substitution and assign it to a variable in Makefile. An example is as follows but I prefer to do it with Perl since other substitutions can be more complex than this.
eval.%:
# make eval.exp-1.ans
# $* --> exp-1.ans
folder=`echo $* | sed -e 's/\..*//g'`
# OR
folder=`echo $* | perl -ne 'm/(.*)\.ans/; print $$1'
# I want that folder will be exp-1
echo $$folder ${folder}
Why this does not work? How can I do this kind of things in Makefile?
Your question is not clear. Are you trying to set a variable in your makefile, so that other recipes, etc. can see it? Or are you just trying to set a variable in one part of your recipe that can be used in other parts of the same recipe?
Make runs recipes in shells that it invokes. It's a fundamental feature of UNIX that no child process can modify the memory/environment/working directory/etc. of its parent process. So no variable that you assign in a recipe (subshell) of a makefile can ever set a make environment variable. There are ways to do this, but not from within a recipe. However that doesn't appear (from your example) to be what you want to do.
The next thing to note is that make runs each logical line of the recipe in a different shell. So shell variables set in one logical line will be lost when that shell exits, and the next logical line cannot see that value. The solution is to ensure that all the lines of your recipe that need access to the variable are on the same logical line, so they'll be sent to the same shell script, like this:
eval.%:
folder=`echo $* | perl -ne 'm/(.*)\.ans/; print $$1' || exit 1 ; \
echo $$folder
Have you tried the $(VARIABLE:suffix=replacement) syntax? In your case, $(*:.ans=). That will work for any suffix, even if it doesn't start with a dot.