I am using GNU autoconf/automake. Is there any way I can control what make prints to stdout from configure.ac or Makefile.am? For example, suppress mv and cp commands being printed out to the screen, only print the name of the file being compiled by gcc rather than the whole command line, highlight gcc warnings in some way.
Is Prettify Automake what you want?
Edit: As of Automake 1.10b, silent-rules is built-in. Not the same code or style but similar in effect.
Modern Automake (after in 1.10b) supports --silent-rules which will suppress the full compile command. (eg, output is "CC foo" instead of "gcc -DHAVE_CONFIG_H ...") That may be all you need. You need to add "silent-rules" to AM_INIT_AUTOMAKE and pass --enable-silent-rules to configure (or put it in CONFIG_SITE) to enable the feature. See the automake docs for details.
I believe the easiest thing is to write a wrapper script which runs *make and parses the output. I believe I have seen this being done in Ubuntu somewhere ...
Related
Is there a way to introduce syntax highlighting to the output I get when I am compiling a program with either gcc or g++. Currently its all one colour. I want the colour to change depending on the output.
That has been done as a Perl script colorgcc.
For further discussion:
Improving g++ output
g++, colorgcc and ccache
In my Makefile, I want to link to a library only if it is installed on the machine. So, for example if the library is hwloc, I want to do the following:
xfoo : foo.o
if (hwloc installed)
gcc foo.o -o $# -lhwloc
else
gcc foo.o -o $#
Is there anyway to do something like this? i.e. Is it possible to check if a specific library is installed and use that as a condition in a Makefile?
Here's the wrong answer:
xfoo : foo.o
if (hwloc installed); then gcc foo.o -o $# -lhwloc; else gcc foo.o -o $#; fi
Commands executed from a Makefile do not have to be just simple, single commands. Anything that a shell can execute, can be invoked from a Makefile. Including an entire script, sandwiched into one line.
Here's the right answer:
However, the above approach is the wrong one. You will find that many free software packages do this kind of thing all the time: conditionally link in a library, if it's available.
But the way that it's done is by running a separate configure script, before running make. Go grab the source tarball to a random free software package, of your choosing, and read the installation instructions. They will all tell you to run the configure script first, before running make.
A crushing majority of free software packages use the GNU toolchain to create their build system -- the configure script, and the Makefile. The GNU toolchain consists of autoconf and automake tools (also libtool in many cases). Go Google these, for more information.
There are also a few other, less popular toolchains, but the GNU toolchain is the most frequently one used, for this sort of a thing. So, to do something along the lines of what you're trying to do, the way this gets typically done is:
In the configure.ac file:
AC_CHECK_LIB(hwloc,some_function_in_the_hwloc_library,[LINK_HWLOC=-lhwloc])
AC_SUBST(LINK_HWLOC)
In the Makefile.am file:
hwloc_LDADD=#LINK_HWLOC#
That's it. That's the way this is done the countless number of times most free software packages need to do this exact same thing. autoconf and automake will take care of writing the shell script and the makefile, that implements this.
I don't have access to a Linux machine at the moment so pardon me my answer will be untested.
I will respectfully disagree with both of my predecessors.
First, using autotools to amend an existing Makefile is a bad idea. Autotools are made to avoid worrying about creating a good Makefile in a simple use case. It's as if OP asked "How to change + to - in my Python script" and the answer was "write a shell script to modify the script, save it in temporary file and execute the file"
Second answer, why do something manually when it can be painlessly done automatically?
So, IMHO the correct answer is, this is the exact use case for $(wildcard):
xfoo: foo.o $(wildcard libhwloc.a)
gcc $(patsubst lib%.a, -l%, $^) -o $#
Note: the library is installed or not ahead of time but not to be made during the build.
If you don't want to get involved with the autotools/etc. for this (which while a reasonable solution is also reasonable to want to avoid for something this simple) and you don't want to have to play guessing games about where people may or may not have this hwloc library installed then the best you can do is to let people turn the feature on manually.
Use three (or four) make variables. USE_HWLOC, HWLOC_LDLIBS, HWLOC_CFLAGS and possibly HWLOC_LDFLAGS.
Then when USE_HWLOC is defined you link against the library and use the other three variables in case they have also been set.
ifdef USE_HWLOC
HWLOC:=-lhwloc
else
HWLOC:=
HWLOC_LDLIBS:=
HWLOC_LDFLAGS:=
HWLOC_CFLAGS:=
endif
xfoo : foo.o
gcc foo.o -o $# $(HWLOC_LDLIBS) $(HWLOC)
Say I have compiled a project (not my own) with autotools and passed some flags to configure. Now I want to compile this same project again, but with slightly different configure flags. Is there a way to tell the configure script to use the old flags, but update them with some additional ones?
I would love to see an easier approach, but to simply add flags you can do:
sed -i '/^ac_configure_extra_args=/s/$/--new-flag --other-flag/' config.status
./config.status --recheck
Normally, I manually edit config.status to do this, and not all sed support -i, but you get the idea. Change the original flags as they are defined in config.status to be the flags you want.
Another option is to cut-n-paste the original configure invocation out of the top of config.log and edit it.
gcc (or other compilers) often generate huge text output and it's very difficult to see where the error is or miss warnings. I've done some search but havn't found a clean simple solution to color code the compiler output (so for instance warnings are yellow, errors are red, etc...)
Gcc 4.9 seems to have added this feature via the -fdiagnostics-color flag:
here's an alternative if you are looking for something very simple:
#!/bin/bash -e
make ${#} 2>&1 | perl -wln -M'Term::ANSIColor' -e '
m/Building|gcc|g++|\bCC\b|\bcc\b/ and print "\e[1;32m", "$_", "\e[0m"
or
m/Error/i and print "\e[1;91m", "$_", "\e[0m"
or
m/Warning/i and print "\e[1;93m", "$_", "\e[0m"
or
m/Linking|\.a\b/ and print "\e[1;36m", "$_", "\e[0m"
or
print; '
Just alias your make to this script and make sure it's executable...
Debian and Ubuntu gives the colorgcc package for that purpose.
And I usually run gcc (and make) thru emacs with M-x compile then the messages are colorized.
addenda
GCC 4.9 has a native colorization facility and GCC 6 - released end of April 2016 - (and probably GCC 5 too) is enabling it by default (when stdout is a terminal).
Ok, I'll just leave a notice about my own (python based) tool also :)
It is called Pluggable Output Processor and designed not only to colorize output of one particular program. Here is sample GCC output before:
After:
See colorgcc, a perl script that coulours the gcc output.
How to install and use colorgcc to colorize your gcc compiler output:
At least 3 answers here so far mention colorgcc, but NONE OF THEM EXPLAIN HOW TO INSTALL IT! (And it's not obvious). So, here's how to install the latest version in Ubuntu!
Go here and click "Clone or download" --> "Download Zip". I saved it into "~/Downloads/Install_Files"
Navigate to it in your file browser and right click it and go to "Extract Here." I now have a directory called "~/Downloads/Install_Files/colorgcc-master".
Copy the "colorgcc.pl" script to "/usr/bin/colorgcc" to "install" it (be sure to use the correct directory according to where you extracted it above): sudo cp ~/Downloads/Install_Files/colorgcc-master/colorgcc.pl /usr/bin/colorgcc
Make it executable: sudo chmod +x /usr/bin/colorgcc
Make the "~/bin" directory if it does not yet exist: mkdir ~/bin
*Make symbolic links that point to "/usr/bin/colorgcc" so that whenever you call gcc or g++ it automatically calls colorgcc instead:
ln -s /usr/bin/colorgcc ~/bin/g++
ln -s /usr/bin/colorgcc ~/bin/gcc
(if you ever want to uninstall colorgcc for some reason just delete these symbolic links "~/bin/g++" and "~/bin/gcc", and the Perl script: "/usr/bin/colorgcc" and you're done)
Done!
Here is a sample g++ output now when I call g++ -Wall -std=c++11 time_until_overflow_2.cpp -o time_until_overflow_2:
*Note: making these symbolic links in "~/bin" only works if "~/bin" is in your PATH variable in a location before the folder where the actual gcc and g++ executables are located. To ensure you have "~/bin" in your path you can view the PATH variable contents with: echo $PATH. If you don't see "/home/YOUR_USERNAME/bin" at the beginning of your path, add it with: export PATH=~/bin:$PATH.
References:
See here for more info. and for where I originally learned most of these steps: https://imranfanaswala.wordpress.com/2009/02/02/setting-up-colorgcc/. Thanks Imran Fanaswala!
~GS
you can use GilCC which is a Ruby tool that will convert GCC output to color in real-time. Right now you have two choices: Perl script (colorGCC) or GilCC and if you already work with Ruby you will like GilCC.
Unique to GilCC; GilCC has warning and errors counters and also shows compile time, very handy when you are trying to improve things. Because it is in Ruby it is cross platform. It is flexible and you can add more gems to customize it anyway you want.
The link to the download page is here.
https://github.com/gilmotta/GilCC
Although GCC 4.9 has -fdiagnostics-color option to enable colored outputs to terminals, I have created a tiny tool called 'crror' to get colorized compiler output.
It supports outputs from make as well. I can add colorize patterns for other tools if anyone requires.
Just like we specify input flags in the settings of the project in Xcode
Can I make few flags like -O3 or -fopenmp as default flags in command line when I use Terminal.
So that I dont have to type them everytime I compile some c++ fies. Is there a file in the installed gcc or C++ that I can edit to make them default.
Please let me know
thanks
For situations like this you'd probably use a makefile if it's project specific (or other similar automated build management like scons or cmake).
If you want it always on the terminal, you can alias your command to always specify those options, i.e.
alias g++='g++ -O3 -fopenmp'
Note that you said 'terminal' so I assume this is a type of *nix. If that is the case you can also set this into your terminal profile, like ~/.bashrc if you use bash, or ~/.zshrc if you use zsh, etc.