How to display the target whose recipe is not executed - makefile

I am invoking a makefile:
$(OBJ_DIR)/%.o : %.c
<PRE> #$(CC) $# -o $< </PRE>
If we have 100 source files and 50 objects are already exist.
While invoking make , it will execute recipe for 51st object file.
If I want output something like this:
<br>
Obj1.c skipped...<br>
Obj2.c skipped...<br>
.<br>
Compiling Obj51.c...<br>
What we should write for that ?

Some make utilities have special debugging mode for track more actions. E.g., with GNU make files, which are not rebuilt, can be tracked with --debug=v option:
make --debug=v
Description of this option in GNU make documentation:
A level above ‘basic’; includes messages about which makefiles were parsed, prerequisites that did not need to be rebuilt, etc. This option also enables ‘basic’ messages.

Related

Make file Doesn't detect changes in source files

I am very much new to make files , I am facing very basic problem , My Makefile doesn't detect changes I made to source files . The problem is , when I first time generate consoleapp binary from my source file i get expected output . But When I change source file again and when I run make again it says
make: 'consoleapp' is up to date , So what changes I have to give to make file so that it detects my changes
Below is my Makefile :
consoleapp:
g++ consoleapp.cpp -o consoleapp
clean:
rm -rf *.o consoleapp
This is my Source File :
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
cout<<"I am ok \n"; // I am changing this line again after giving make
return 0;
}
make relies on the makefile author to tell it what each target's prerequisites are -- that is, which other targets or files affect the construction of the target in question, so that if they are newer or themselves out of date then the target is out of date and should be rebuilt. As your other answer already indicates, you do not designate any prerequisites for your targets, so make considers them out of date if and only if they don't exist at all.
That's actually problematic for both targets, albeit in different ways. For target consoleapp, which represents an actual file that you want to build, the failure to specify any prerequisites yields the problem you ask about: make does not recognize that changes to the source file necessitate a rebuild. The easiest way to fix that would be to just add the source file name to the recipe's header line, after the colon:
consoleapp: consoleapp.cpp
g++ consoleapp.cpp -o consoleapp
Generally speaking, however, it is wise to minimize duplication in your makefile code, and to that end you can use some of make's automatic variables to avoid repeating target and prerequisite names in your rule's recipe. In particular, I recommend always using $# to designate the rule's target inside its recipe:
consoleapp: consoleapp.cpp
g++ consoleapp.cpp -o $#
It's a bit more situational for prerequisites. In this case, all the prerequisites are source files to be compiled, and furthermore there is only one. If you are willing to rely on GNU extensions then in the recipe you might represent the sources via either $< (which represents the first prerequisite), or as $^ (which represents the whole prerequisite list, with any duplicates removed). For example,
consoleapp: consoleapp.cpp
g++ $^ -o $#
If you are not using GNU make, however, or if you want to support other people who don't, then you are stuck with some repetition here. You can still save yourself some effort, especially in the event of a change to the source list, by creating a make variable for the sources and duplicating that instead of duplicating the source list itself:
consoleapp_SRCS = consoleapp.cpp
consoleapp: $(consoleapp_SRCS)
g++ $(consoleapp_SRCS) -o $#
I mentioned earlier that there are problems with both of your rules. But what could be wrong with the clean rule, you may ask? It does not create a file named "clean", so its recipe will be run every time you execute make clean, just as you want, right? Not necessarily. Although that rule does not create a file named "clean", if such a file is created by some other means then suddenly your clean rule will stop working, as that file will be found already up to date with respect to its (empty) list of prerequisites.
POSIX standard make has no solution for that, but GNU make provides for it with the special target .PHONY. With GNU make, any targets designated as prerequisites of .PHONY are always considered out of date, and the filesystem is not even checked for them. This is exactly to support targets such as clean, which are used to designate actions to perform that do not produce persistent artifacts on the file system. Although that's a GNU extension, it is portable in the sense that it uses standard make syntax and the target's form is reserved for extensions, so a make that does not support .PHONY in the GNU sense is likely either to just ignore it or to treat it as an ordinary rule:
.PHONY: clean
clean:
rm -rf *.o consoleapp
because your target has no dependence. Please use this codes that rely to all cpp file in current dir to update binary.
SRCS=consoleapp.cpp
consoleapp: $(SRCS)
g++ $< -o $#

Delete targets with recipes failed in Makefile

I tried to use .DELETE_ON_ERROR target in makefile in order to delete both $(OBJ)
and executable files if the recipe fails, but it doesn't work. If I put an error inside any object file than while compiling the pattern rule an error occurs and it stops. The old object file is still on its place but I expect .DELETE_ON_ERROR to remove it.
Can anyone test the code? Can -include $(DEP) or flag -DDBG influence? The goal is to delete both the .o file that failed and the executable.
OUTPUT = executable
CPP := $(shell find $(SRC) -type f -name "*.cpp")
OBJ := $(CPP:.cpp=.o)
DEP := $(OBJ:.o=.d)
CXX := g++
CXXFLAGS =-MMD -MP -DDBG
INCLUDES = -I.
.DELETE_ON_ERROR :
$(OUTPUT): $(OBJ)
$(CXX) $^ -o $#
%.o: %.cpp
$(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) $(INCLUDES) -c $< -o $#
-include $(DEP)
.PHONY : clean
clean:
rm -rf $(OBJ) $(DEP)
EDIT: According to the Ondrej K. solution to fix this problem you need to add #touch command before compilator in order to make the object files changed (the docs read "delete the target of a rule if it has changed".). So, the code should look like this:
%.o: %.cpp
#touch $#
$(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) $(INCLUDES) -c $< -o $#
Not sure what failure you're seeing, but I am afraid there really isn't a good way for you to do that. .o files and executable ($(OUTPUT)) are separate rules. If the latter fails, former is already out of consideration. See the documentation:
.DELETE_ON_ERROR:
If .DELETE_ON_ERROR is mentioned as a target anywhere in the makefile, then make will delete the target of a rule if it has changed and its recipe exits with a nonzero exit status, just as it does when it receives a signal. See Errors in Recipes.
In other words, if your the target producing a binary object failed after .o target itself got updated, make would prune the changed file. But if your executable did not link, it won't go back and delete object files.
Not sure it'd be nice, but if you really needed to, you could probably achieve this by refactoring your makefile to basically have direct exec + objs from source prerequisites rule with a single recipe. Obvious downside, such rule would mean single .c file change causing all files being recompiled (basically negating substantial benefit of using make).
EDIT: I'll expand on the comment a bit to clarify. What you seem to want is: in case there is a broken .c file and compilation fails, remove the old .o file. That is quite clearly not how .DELETE_ON_ERROR works though. If the .o file already got updated, and then the rule failed, it would remove it ("delete the target of a rule if it has changed"), but in case of a mentioned syntactical problem, the compiler would fail before it would produced an .o file.
So, if for instance you updated your (pattern) rule for compilation so that it first touches (effectively updates timestamp) on the .o file and then tries to compile. After the compiler call and rule failed make would consider the target of the failed root to have been updated and remove it. Alternatively you could also change to rule to first try to rm the expected '.o' file in which case you actually wouldn't need to use .DELETE_ON_ERROR (and if there is no change in the relevant sources, the rule does not get used, so it's actually not as terrible as it sounds). Either way is not exactly very clean, but leads towards the behavior I understand you're describing.
It is possible that the Compiler crashes while writing the Output file. In this case, there is a corrupt output file that is newer than its sources. Make will stop due to the error, but on next run, it won't recompile the output file as it is newer than ist sources - and the make will fail again and again in the build step.
With the .DELETE_ON_ERROR rule, make will delete the Output file if the compiler (or whatever build step failed) exits with an error after touching (and corrupting) the Output file, so it will be recompiled on next run. (if the Compiler failed without touching the old output file, it will always be recompiled on next run anyway)

makefile: dependency not build

The question was edited after MadScientist's answer. See history for the original makefile, but the problem stays the same.
I have a small makefile:
DEPFLAGS=-MD -Mo $(OUTDIR)/$*.Td
POSTCOMPILE=#mv -f $(OUTDIR)/$*.Td $(OUTDIR)/$*.d && touch $#
VPATH=../src
OUTDIR=../out
SOURCES:=$(notdir $(wildcard ../src/*.c))
OBJECTS:=$(SOURCES:%.c=$(OUTDIR)/%.o)
all: $(OBJECTS) $(OBJECTS:%.o=%.d)
$(OUTDIR)/%.o : %.c
$(OUTDIR)/%.o : %.c $(OUTDIR)/%.d
#$(CC) $(DEPFLAGS) -c $< -o $#
#$(POSTCOMPILE)
$(OUTDIR)/%.d : ;
.PRECIOUS: $(OUTDIR)/%.d
Directory structure looks like:
src
contains file.c
out
empty, after make: contains file.o and file.d
make
contains the makefile
When I call the makefile everything works fine and two files are generated: file.o and file.d
However, when I delete file.d nothing happens. I would expect that make finds a missing dependency for file.c and starts a rebuild. Why doesn't it happen?
Make version is 3.81 built for i386-pc-mingw32 under Windows 7.
Marking a file as .PRECIOUS does not remove all aspects of it's "intermediateness". All it does is prevent it from being deleted, but this feature of intermediate files is still in effect:
If an ordinary file b does not exist, and make considers a target that depends on b, it invariably creates b and then updates the target from b. But if b is an intermediate file, then make can leave well enough alone. It won’t bother updating b, or the ultimate target, unless some prerequisite of b is newer than that target or there is some other reason to update that target.
This is why your .d file is not recreated. In order for it to be recreated you need to ensure it's not an intermediate file. Fortunately this is trivial to do: you just need to mention the files explicitly somewhere as a target or prerequisite. You can do it like this:
all: $(OBJECTS) $(SOURCES:%.c=$(OUTDIR)/%.d)
Or if you prefer like this:
depends: $(SOURCES:%.c=$(OUTDIR)/%.d)
which would allow you to run make depends to update the dependency files, if you wanted to.
I'll just point out in passing that this method of managing dependencies is considered outdated. There's a better, more advanced way it can be done described here among other places.
(I'll be a horrific necromancer here, but I've ran into same problem, and found that actual issue isn't one mentioned in answer or comments here)
Dependency rule generated by compiler by default sports file name with ALL suffixes replaced by single suffix .o and path removed. Which doesn't match the pattern of rule in makefile.
For gcc 4.x and later correct options would be
$(OUTDIR)/%.o : %.c $(OUTDIR)/%.d
#$(CC) -MF $(OUTDIR)/$*.Td -MT $# -c $< -o $#
Mo flag no longer exist, you have to use only MF flag to specify dependency file name.MT flag allows to provide a literal line for target name.

makefile conditionals

Note: using MinGW's make (should be GNU make)
i have a couple of -include statements in my makefile to import dependencies which were generated using g++ -MM. However I would like to only do this when necessary. I have several different build targets and I don't want all of their respective dependency files to be included since this takes a while (suppose I'm running make clean: no need to include them in this case)
Here's the format of my makefile.
DEPS_debug = $(patsubst %.cpp,build_debug/%.d,$(SRC))
OBJ_debug = $(patsubst %.cpp,build_debug/%.o,$(SRC))
all: program_debug
-include $(DEPS_debug) #make: include: Command not found
program_debug: $(OBJ_debug)
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(OBJ_debug) -o $#
If you really don't want to include those files needlessly, you have a couple of options:
You can put in a conditional as Diego Sevilla suggests (but I would recommend using MAKECMDGOALS so that you can write a more flexible version, specific to targets, e.g. you'll include foo.d if and only if you're making foo.o).
You can use make recursively (heresy!), invoking $(MAKE) for each target object, using a makefile that includes that target's dependencies.
But actually including the file takes negligible time, it's the rebuilding of the file (automatic for any included file that's out of date) that takes time.
If needless rebuilding is what you want to avoid, you can use a very clever trick. When must foo.d be rebuilt? Only when something about foo has changed. But in that case foo.o must also be rebuilt. So don't have a seperate rule for foo.d, just rebuild it as a side effect of making foo.o. That way you can include all dependency files and not waste time rebuilding them if they aren't needed.
EDIT:
I'm astounded that merely including these files can add 2-3 seconds to make clean. My last paragraph is off the mark, so let me expand on the first two options.
If all is the only target for which these files should be included, and you make all from the command line (and not e.g. make all tests tarball install kitchenSink), then this will do it:
ifeq ($(MAKECMDGOALS),all)
-include $(DEPS_debug)
endif
Note that this will not include foo.d if you make foo.o. You can write a more sophisticated conditional, something like
$(foreach targ,$(MAKECMDGOALS),$(eval $(call include_deps $(targ)))...
but that's pretty advanced, so let's get a simple version working first.
If you'd rather avoid the conditional and use recursive Make, the simplest way is to split the makefile in two:
makefile:
all:
$(MAKE) -f makefile.all
clean:
rm whatever
...other rules
makefile.all:
DEPS_debug = $(patsubst %.cpp,build_debug/%.d,$(SRC))
OBJ_debug = $(patsubst %.cpp,build_debug/%.o,$(SRC))
-include $(DEPS_debug)
all: program_debug
program_debug: $(OBJ_debug)
$(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(OBJ_debug) -o $#
Indenting a line by a TAB makes make think it's a command to be passed to the shell (as you found out). It doesn't work that way.
The - in front of include suppresses errors that might result from DEPS_debug not existing (e.g. when running clean or release without having had a dependency-file-generating call first). Since DEPS_debug is not a dependency of those rules (clean / release), your dependency files do not get generated when you call them, and everything is fine. I don't really see the problem you're having - you don't have to make the include conditional.
Perhaps you'd like to change your approach, though. Instead of having a seperate *.d target, with a seperate -M preprocessor pass, you might want to try something like -MMD -MP which generates the dependency files inline during code generation, in your standard *.c -> *.o pass.
(I know this sounds completely wrong at first, but when you think about it, it makes sense. Makefile logic is a bit backwards that way, unless you're familiar with functional programming.)
includes are independent of the rules, as they are makefile indications, not compilation indications. You can, however, use makefile conditionals based on special makefile variables such as MAKECMDGOALS, that is set to the default goal:
ifeq ($(MAKECMDGOALS),all)
-include whatever
endif
This is included when no default goal is specified. You can change the condition to specify the exact goal you want to check to include other sub-makefiles.

making all rules depend on the Makefile itself

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 $<

Resources