Consider the following Makefile:
%.o.gz: %.o
gzip $<
If hello.c exists in the same directory, I can invoke make with the target hello.o.gz:
$ make hello.o.gz
cc -c -o hello.o hello.c
gzip hello.o
$
I believe this invokes a chain of implicit rules:
built-in implicit rule to compile .c to .o
implicit rule given in the makefile to gzip the .o file
This works fine as I would expect it to.
Now suppose I modify the makefile a bit:
%.gz: %
gzip $<
The idea here is to use the "compile .c to binary" built-in implicit rule, then gzip the resulting binary. I expect to be able to invoke make like this:
$ make hello.gz
make: *** No rule to make target `hello.gz'. Stop.
$
But it doesn't work.
Interestingly it does work if I invoke make twice, once to build the binary, and once to gzip it, so this appears to have something to do with the rule chaining:
$ make hello
cc hello.c -o hello
$ make hello.gz
gzip hello
$
Why can I not put the "compile .c to binary" built-in implicit rule into a chain whereas I can put a "compile .c to .o" implicit rule into a chain?
Is there some way I can modify my implicit gzip rule to make this work?
I have read the Chains of Implicit Rules section of the make documentation, but as far as I can see there is no exception for the "compile .c to binary" built-in implicit rule. Or am I missing something?
I believe you're hitting this behvaior because you're using match-anything rules (that is, a rule where the target is a % with no restriction). There are a number of special cases for handling these rules, because without those special cases the number of rules make would need to check during implicit rule search would be many orders of magnitude larger.
See http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Match_002dAnything-Rules.html for information on the restrictions placed on match-anything rules.
The best workaround I could come up with so far is:
ifneq (,$(wildcard $(MAKECMDGOALS:%.gz=%.c)))
$(MAKECMDGOALS): %.gz: %
gzip $<
endif
This falls apart if more than one target is passed to make.
Related
I have this rule in my Makefile:
%: ${OBJ}/%.o ${OBJ}/AgentProgram.o ${LIB}
$(CXX) $^ ${LDFLAGS} ${LIB_DIRS} ${LIBS} $(OUTPUT_OPTION)
If obj/Foo.o exists, make will use this rule. However, if the object doesn't already exist, it will use the built-in rule and attempt to directly compile from my .cpp.
Is there some way to define this rule as the default, or turn off the built-in rule?
My workaround is to modify my make bins target to produce all .o files first. It wasn't that hard in this case, I altered:
bins: ${BINS}
and turned it into this: (I already had ${OBJECTS} available)
bins: ${OBJECTS} ${BINS}
You can cancel pattern rules, including built-in pattern rules, by defining them without a recipe:
%: %.c
%: %.cpp
will remove the pattern rule for creating binaries from a .c and a .cpp.
Or, with a sufficiently new version of GNU make, you can disable ALL builtin rules by adding this to your makefile:
MAKEFLAGS += -r
(see the manual for the meaning of the -r option).
SOURCE=a.c b.c c.c
ASM=$(patsubst %.c,%.s, $(SOURCE))
all:%.o
gcc -o test $^
$(ASM):%.c
gcc -S -o $# $<
%.o:%.s
gcc -c -o$# $<
I want to generate assembly code (.s) first, then compile the assembly code to object (.o), then link them.
But it seems above makefile code does not work. What is the correct code?
When asking questions, does not work is never very useful... if it worked you probably wouldn't be asking a question! :-) Instead you should always show the command you ran and the output you received (or at least the failing part of the output if it's long). Please cut and paste the actual text rather than paraphrasing messages. Also, including the version of the make program you're using (make --version) and the platform you're running on is often helpful.
Luckily this time we can figure out the problem without this information:
This:
$(ASM):%.c
gcc -S -o $# $<
where ASM is a.s b.s c.s, is not a pattern rule because the targets don't contain a pattern character %. That means the prerequisite %.c is not treated as a pattern, but as an actual file name, literally %.c which obviously doesn't exist.
Similarly, this:
all: %.o
has the same problem: all is a target, so this depends on the literal file named %.o which doesn't exist, and can't be created.
Also as a general rule every recipe that creates a target must create the actual target you told make it would, so this all rule is wrong because the target name is all but the recipe creates the target test.
Finally, it's a very bad idea to name your program test because test is a common UNIX program and a shell built-in, so if you run test it won't do the right thing (if you run ./test it will work).
You want to have all depend on the program you want to build, say mytest, and mytest should depend on the actual .o files:
all: mytest
mytest: $(SOURCE:.c=.o)
gcc -o $# $^
Next, you need to define a pattern rule that knows how to create an assembly file from a source file:
%.s : %.c
gcc -S -o $# $<
That, along with your other pattern rules, is all you need: make will figure it all out from that.
Finally, make has a built-in rule that tells it how to build object files directly from source files. It's best to get rid of this to force make to use your rules; add this to your makefile to delete it:
%.o : %.c
Consider this makefile:
%: %.c
#echo making $#
#touch $#
.SECONDEXPANSION:
%.pid: $$(basename $$#)
$(<D)/$(<F) --pidfile=$<.pid
Here, the first rule builds a program and second rule starts it, producing a pid-file. Note: I know that secondary expansion is unnecessary in this example; the real makefile is more complex and I really need secondary expansion there.
So, typing make foo.pid, I expect Make to build foo from foo.c by the first rule and then run ./foo --pidfile=foo.pid by the second one.
However, it does not seem to work:
$ make -f Makefile.test foo.pid
make: *** No rule to make target 'foo.pid'. Stop.
This somehow relates to secondary-expanded dependencies which are provided by pattern rules. If I write either
%.pid: % in the second rule (i. e. get rid of secondary-expansion), or
foo: %: %.c in the first rule (i. e. write an explicit static pattern rule),
it all suddenly works. Why? Is this a limitation of GNU Make? In my case, I'd like to avoid pre-listing all possible programs in the first rule.
I think your situation is described in section 10.5.5 Match-Anything Pattern Rules. Whay you have here is a non-terminal match-anything rule, which is not allowed to match a file name that indicates a specific type of data.
If you had let's say
%:: %.c
#echo making $#
#touch $#
it would work.
I want to make a language depend target. In Particular: I have one source-file and I want to create different Objects which where add to the corresponding language folder. That single source file will differ in the C-Flags, the compiler will get. As long as I used it in a static way, it works quite fine.
de/info.o en/info.o es/info.o : info.c
$(ECHO) (DEP) $< for $#
Now I thought, it would be great if it is a bit more dynamic, in case i'll add a new language depending file. So I used a wildcard as followed:
de/%.o en/%.o es/%.o : %.c
$(ECHO) (DEP) $< for $#
But now it just make the first target and ignores the rest. The Make-Debug prints the following thing:
Successfully remade target file `de/info.o'.
Considering target file `en/info.o'.
File `en/info.o' was considered already.
Just in case: No, the objects do not exist. So there is no target, but an existing dependencie, so make should execute the rules.
EDIT: Found a solution for that Problem.
define FOO
$(1)/%.o : %.c
$(ECHO) $$< for $(1)
endef
$(foreach lang,$(LANGUAGE_LIST), $(eval $(call FOO,$(lang))))
Inspired by: http://www.gnu.org/software/make/manual/make.html#Eval-Function
Pattern rules work differently than implicit rules. While an implicit rule such as
a b c: d
command
is equivalent to the longer notation
a: d
command
b: d
command
c: d
command
this does NOT hold for pattern rules. Pattern rules with multiple targets are explicitly required to build all of their targets in a single invocation of command. Thus you would have to write
$ cat GNUmakefile
all: de/x.o en/x.o es/x.o
de/%.o: %.c
#echo $# from $<
en/%.o: %.c
#echo $# from $<
es/%.o: %.c
#echo $# from $<
$ gmake
de/x.o from x.c
en/x.o from x.c
es/x.o from x.c
The relevant documentation is found in 10.5.1 Introduction to Pattern Rules of the GNU make manual:
Pattern rules may have more than one target. Unlike normal rules, this does not act as many different rules with the same prerequisites and recipe. If a pattern rule has multiple targets, make knows that the rule’s recipe is responsible for making all of the targets. The recipe is executed only once to make all the targets. When searching for a pattern rule to match a target, the target patterns of a rule other than the one that matches the target in need of a rule are incidental: make worries only about giving a recipe and prerequisites to the file presently in question. However, when this file’s recipe is run, the other targets are marked as having been updated themselves.
Here a is my makefile (GNU make) to compile a small OCaml program:
SUFFIXES:=
OCAML=ocamlopt
LD=ocamlopt
OFLAGS=
.PHONY: all clean
all: playground
playground.cmx: playground.ml lstream.cmi
playground: lstream.cmx playground.cmx
%.cmi: %.ml
$(OCAML) $(OFLAGS) -c $<
%.cmx: %.ml
$(OCAML) $(OFLAGS) -c $<
%: %.cmx
$(LD) -o $# $^
playground uses functions from the Lstream module. In this case, the ocaml linker requires the files to link to be specified in order of dependency (eg: ocamlopt -o playground lstream.cmx playground.cmx).
Despite the fact that I defined the playground rule's dependencies in the right order,
make consistently re-orders them and executes ocamlopt -o playground playground.cmx lstream.cmx which causes a linker error.
Is there a way to enforce the correct behaviour ? I would like to avoid specifying the link command explicitely and let make infer it from the dependencies.
Implicit rules always force the pattern matching prerequisite to be first, regardless of the order in which they're defined elsewhere. This is almost always what you want, because in most rules the pattern matching prerequisite is special.
For example when compiling an object file the prerequisites consist of one source file and a bunch of header files; the source file is special and needs to be listed on the command line. Make ensures that for a pattern rule %.o : %.c (for example) the prerequisite matching %.c is first in the list, and so is assigned to the $< automatic variable, and it can be treated differently.
In any event the short answer is no, you cannot modify this behavior. An implicit rule % : %.cmx matching a target playground will always force the prerequisite playground.cmx to be listed first in the prerequisite list. The other prerequisites will maintain their order.
If you really need the prerequisites to maintain their order then I recommend using a static pattern rule:
TARGETS = playground
$(TARGETS) : % :
$(LD) -o $# $^
(you can also use a "match anything" pattern rule but this can be a real performance degrader). Here since you have no pattern in the prerequisite list, nothing will be reordered.