%% mst <address@hidden> writes:
m> It turns out that there's no easy way, now, to determine inside the
m> makefile whether the output is to tty or now.
m> the simple $(shell perl -e 'print 1 if (-t STDOUT)')
m> does not work, since anything inside a shell is sending output
m> to shell and not to tty!
m> I ended up doing this:
m> .PHONE: isatty.mak
m> include isatty.mak
m> isatty.mak:
m> @perl -e 'print "isatty:=",(-t STDOUT),"\n"' > $@
m> and this works but it forces an extra evaluation of makefile
m> and seems too complicated for a simple thing like that ...
m> How about a nwe function $(isatty [n]) - like isatty on file n?
Hmm. This is an extremely rare situation--I think this is the first
time anyone has asked for it.
Unfortunately I don't think this is appropriate for a new function in
GNU make: it's too rarely needed and it's _very_ system specific (what
would that function do on a VMS system, or an Amiga system?)
In the future we will be integrating a scripting language with GNU make,
to provide a much richer set of function capabilities (this is one main
reason I don't want to add too many new functions). Hopefully that
language will have facilities for testing this.
Thanks for the request...