I've been learning make and am struggling to figure something out. I have some rules with this general structure.
FILE = "myfile.txt"
test :
YOUR = $(subst my,your,$(FILE));\
cat $(FILE) $(YOUR)
I would expect the end result to be running the command:
cat myfile.txt yourfile.txt
Instead I get the following...
YOUR = "yourfile.txt";\
cat "myfile.txt"
/bin/sh: YOUR: command not found
make: *** [test] Error 1
If instead of using the subst function, I just do YOUR="yourfile" in the makefile, everything looks fine. Any suggestions or have I missed something pretty fundamental? I should add that I'm using tabs and not spaces to start the lines for the commands within the rule.
FILE = "myfile.txt"
test :
$(eval YOUR = $(subst my,your,$(FILE)))
cp $(FILE) $(YOUR)
You have to use the eval function in the recipe (Define make variable at rule execution time)
You need to distinguish between what make executes and what the shell executes. Your line with YOUR = starts with a tab and is part of the actions of a rule, so it is executed by the shell, which can't find a program YOUR to execute with some arguments.
Place the expansion outside the rule:
YOUR = $(subst my,your,$(FILE))
test:
cat $(FILE) $(YOUR)
Note that shell assignments require no space around the equals sign, and use ${} rather than $() to reference variables: YOUR=${FILE/my/your} in Bash (and if written in a make rule, you'd need $$ in place of $ so that the shell sees a single dollar sign and make does not try the variable expansion that it doesn't understand). The shell uses $() to execute the command contained within, and the result is often captured in a variable: YOUR=$(echo "${FILE}" | sed 's/my/your/').
If you only need the variable in the shell recipe and not in the make context then you don't need to bother playing with eval (which are hoisted) and can just assign to shell variables instead.
For example:
FILE = "myfile.txt"
test :
YOUR='$(subst my,your,$(FILE))';\
cat $(FILE) "$${YOUR}"
Related
Considering that every command is run in its own shell, what is the best way to run a multi-line bash command in a makefile? For example, like this:
for i in `find`
do
all="$all $i"
done
gcc $all
You can use backslash for line continuation. However note that the shell receives the whole command concatenated into a single line, so you also need to terminate some of the lines with a semicolon:
foo:
for i in `find`; \
do \
all="$$all $$i"; \
done; \
gcc $$all
But if you just want to take the whole list returned by the find invocation and pass it to gcc, you actually don't necessarily need a multiline command:
foo:
gcc `find`
Or, using a more shell-conventional $(command) approach (notice the $ escaping though):
foo:
gcc $$(find)
As indicated in the question, every sub-command is run in its own shell. This makes writing non-trivial shell scripts a little bit messy -- but it is possible! The solution is to consolidate your script into what make will consider a single sub-command (a single line).
Tips for writing shell scripts within makefiles:
Escape the script's use of $ by replacing with $$
Convert the script to work as a single line by inserting ; between commands
If you want to write the script on multiple lines, escape end-of-line with \
Optionally start with set -e to match make's provision to abort on sub-command failure
This is totally optional, but you could bracket the script with () or {} to emphasize the cohesiveness of a multiple line sequence -- that this is not a typical makefile command sequence
Here's an example inspired by the OP:
mytarget:
{ \
set -e ;\
msg="header:" ;\
for i in $$(seq 1 3) ; do msg="$$msg pre_$${i}_post" ; done ;\
msg="$$msg :footer" ;\
echo msg=$$msg ;\
}
The ONESHELL directive allows to write multiple line recipes to be executed in the same shell invocation.
all: foo
SOURCE_FILES = $(shell find . -name '*.c')
.ONESHELL:
foo: ${SOURCE_FILES}
FILES=()
for F in $^; do
FILES+=($${F})
done
gcc "$${FILES[#]}" -o $#
There is a drawback though : special prefix characters (‘#’, ‘-’, and ‘+’) are interpreted differently.
https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/One-Shell.html
Of course, the proper way to write a Makefile is to actually document which targets depend on which sources. In the trivial case, the proposed solution will make foo depend on itself, but of course, make is smart enough to drop a circular dependency. But if you add a temporary file to your directory, it will "magically" become part of the dependency chain. Better to create an explicit list of dependencies once and for all, perhaps via a script.
GNU make knows how to run gcc to produce an executable out of a set of .c and .h files, so maybe all you really need amounts to
foo: $(wildcard *.h) $(wildcard *.c)
What's wrong with just invoking the commands?
foo:
echo line1
echo line2
....
And for your second question, you need to escape the $ by using $$ instead, i.e. bash -c '... echo $$a ...'.
EDIT: Your example could be rewritten to a single line script like this:
gcc $(for i in `find`; do echo $i; done)
Consider the following Makefile.
$(shell touch /tmp/example.txt)
FILE := /tmp/example.txt
CONTENTS = $(shell cat $(FILE); bash -c 'echo [debugging id: $$RANDOM]')
.PHONY: all
all:
#cat $(FILE)
#echo '$$(CONTENTS):' $(CONTENTS)
bash -c 'echo file-contents-$$RANDOM' > $(FILE)
#cat $(FILE)
#echo '$$(CONTENTS):' $(CONTENTS) # This line outputs the old contents. Why?
It prints the contents of the file, overwrites with new contents and prints the contents again. It shows as (after second shots of make):
file-contents-1543
$(CONTENTS): file-contents-1543 [debugging id: 15172]
bash -c 'echo file-contents-$RANDOM' > /tmp/example.txt
file-contents-22441
$(CONTENTS): file-contents-1543 [debugging id: 151]
The old content is file-contents-1543 and new content is file-contents-22441 (the numbers are random), but the last line echo $(CONTENTS) does not print the new contents.
I think the command is actually called twice as debugging ids show but shell function in the lazy variable seems to be executed before writing the new contents to the file.
I expect that lazy variable in Makefile is evaluated every time it is referred, the echo $(CONTENTS) command always prints the latest file contents. What am I wrong?
By the way, I found that using CONTENTS = $$(cat $(FILE)) works as I expect. I will using this instead of shell function but is it ok?
I expect that lazy variable in Makefile is evaluated every time it is referred, the echo $(CONTENTS) command always prints the latest file contents. What am I wrong?
First of all, in make's slang these variables are called recursive, not lazy. And, yes, they get expanded (i.e. recursively substituted) each time they are referred with $(CONTENTS). Considering that $(eval...) and $(shell...) (as pretty much anything looking as $(...)) also went through the same (recursive) expansion procedure (albeit, with some "side-effects"), each expansion of such variable could also result in some sort of "evaluation" or "execution".
Next, the order of expansion in make is a bit specific. In particular, the recipes (i.e. the lines starting with [tab]) are expanded after the whole makefile was (pre-)processed, but before the first line of the recipe gets executed by shell. Which is the main source of your confusion, I suppose.
I found that using CONTENTS = $$(cat $(FILE)) works as I expect
$$ is a way to get a single literal $ after an expansion procedure. So $$(cat $(FILE)) when expanded becomes $(cat /tmp/example.txt) which is a legal syntax for command substitution in bash. This means it will work only as part of a bash command (recipe line). If that is what you want then it's okay.
I am trying to follow the meaty skeleton tutorial on osdev. The Makefile is not running one of the shell scripts. I have set all of the permissions on each of the files to be executable.
In lib/Makefile, I have the below few lines set:
$(info DEFAULT_HOST!=../default-host.sh)
$(info HOST?=DEFAULT_HOST)
$(info HOSTARCH!=../target-triplet-to-arch.sh $(HOST))
after these lines have executed, neither DEFAULT_HOST nor HOSTARCH get set.
default-host.sh:
#!/bin/sh
echo i686-elf
arget-triplet-to-arch.sh:
#!/bin/sh
if echo "$1" | grep -Eq 'i[[:digit:]]86-'; then
touch here.txt
echo i386
else
touch there.txt
echo "$1" | grep -Eo '^[[:alnum:]_]*'
fi
Note, I added the touch statements in arget-triplet-to-arch.sh. When run from the shell, one or other of those files is created, but not when the Makefile is run. This means that make seems to not be running the shell commands. How can I get make to run the shell commands?
As Beta says, info doesn't "allow you to see the value of that line being evaluated". info expands its argument then prints it to stdout. "Expands" means it resolves any variable references, it doesn't mean interpreting it as a makefile command. So if you run $(info hi) it prints "hi". If you run $(info foo = bar) if prints foo = bar but does not set the value of the variable foo to bar.
For using !=, note that this feature was added to GNU make 4.0. If your version is older than that then this assignment doesn't do what you expect. In particular, a line like FOO!=echo bar will be interpreted as if it were FOO! = echo bar... in other words it sets the make variable named FOO!.
Personally I always put whitespace around the assignment statements in my makefiles... this makes it clear that they are make assignments, not shell variable assignments (not that it shouldn't be clear anyway for anyone who knows makefile syntax, but...). In newer versions of GNU make, variable names cannot contain whitespace.
I have a rule like this in a makefile:
target : dependencies
rm -rd somedirectory
runcodecoverage.exe # this generates somefile
$(eval COVERAGE=$(shell grep "blah" somefile))
#echo $(COVERAGE)
When I run this file the first time (after make cleaning) the echo doesn't print anything. But the second and times after that, it prints the correct result. If I replace the $(eval ..) line with just grep "blah" somefile I get the result I want, so the problem must be in the use of $(eval) and $(shell). Why is this happening?
Edit: I solved this by adding a new dependency, so it now looks like this:
generatesomefile :
runcodecoverage.exe # this generates somefile
target : dependencies generatesomefile
rm -rd somedirectory
$(eval COVERAGE=$(shell grep "blah" somefile))
#echo $(COVERAGE)
It seems like $(eval) was being substituted with the result of grep as soon as the "target" target was entered, even though I wanted it to be run after runcodecoverage.exe had run. In this sense the answer I accepted as correct wasn't quite right - the docs say this on variable expansion:
Rule Definition
A rule is always expanded the same way, regardless of the form:
immediate : immediate ; deferred
deferred
The eval function doesn't work the way you think it does.
The first time you run Make, it expands the eval function and carries out the variable assignment before executing any rule. And since there is no somefile, the grep returns nothing and COVERAGE stays empty. When Make executes the rule, it passes the empty variable to the echo which duly reports nothing.
The second time you run Make, once again it expands the eval function, executes the grep on somefile (which was built in the first run), and stores the result in COVERAGE. Then it executes the rule and passes COVERAGE to the echo, which puts it up on your screen.
The $(eval ...) runs when your Makefile is parsed, not when the recipe is executed.
It's not clear to me what you expect to happen; setting a Make variable from within a recipe does not seem like a sustainable approach, but it depends a lot on where and how you need to use this variable. If all you need is to output the coverage from the same recipe, replace the last couple of lines with just
grep "blah" somefile
Considering that every command is run in its own shell, what is the best way to run a multi-line bash command in a makefile? For example, like this:
for i in `find`
do
all="$all $i"
done
gcc $all
You can use backslash for line continuation. However note that the shell receives the whole command concatenated into a single line, so you also need to terminate some of the lines with a semicolon:
foo:
for i in `find`; \
do \
all="$$all $$i"; \
done; \
gcc $$all
But if you just want to take the whole list returned by the find invocation and pass it to gcc, you actually don't necessarily need a multiline command:
foo:
gcc `find`
Or, using a more shell-conventional $(command) approach (notice the $ escaping though):
foo:
gcc $$(find)
As indicated in the question, every sub-command is run in its own shell. This makes writing non-trivial shell scripts a little bit messy -- but it is possible! The solution is to consolidate your script into what make will consider a single sub-command (a single line).
Tips for writing shell scripts within makefiles:
Escape the script's use of $ by replacing with $$
Convert the script to work as a single line by inserting ; between commands
If you want to write the script on multiple lines, escape end-of-line with \
Optionally start with set -e to match make's provision to abort on sub-command failure
This is totally optional, but you could bracket the script with () or {} to emphasize the cohesiveness of a multiple line sequence -- that this is not a typical makefile command sequence
Here's an example inspired by the OP:
mytarget:
{ \
set -e ;\
msg="header:" ;\
for i in $$(seq 1 3) ; do msg="$$msg pre_$${i}_post" ; done ;\
msg="$$msg :footer" ;\
echo msg=$$msg ;\
}
The ONESHELL directive allows to write multiple line recipes to be executed in the same shell invocation.
all: foo
SOURCE_FILES = $(shell find . -name '*.c')
.ONESHELL:
foo: ${SOURCE_FILES}
FILES=()
for F in $^; do
FILES+=($${F})
done
gcc "$${FILES[#]}" -o $#
There is a drawback though : special prefix characters (‘#’, ‘-’, and ‘+’) are interpreted differently.
https://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/One-Shell.html
Of course, the proper way to write a Makefile is to actually document which targets depend on which sources. In the trivial case, the proposed solution will make foo depend on itself, but of course, make is smart enough to drop a circular dependency. But if you add a temporary file to your directory, it will "magically" become part of the dependency chain. Better to create an explicit list of dependencies once and for all, perhaps via a script.
GNU make knows how to run gcc to produce an executable out of a set of .c and .h files, so maybe all you really need amounts to
foo: $(wildcard *.h) $(wildcard *.c)
What's wrong with just invoking the commands?
foo:
echo line1
echo line2
....
And for your second question, you need to escape the $ by using $$ instead, i.e. bash -c '... echo $$a ...'.
EDIT: Your example could be rewritten to a single line script like this:
gcc $(for i in `find`; do echo $i; done)