Re: include directory

[John Calcote]

Vad,

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 1:54 AM, Vad N <address@hidden> wrote:
> depend : main.c
>              $(CC) -M $(CPPFLAGS) $^ > $@
>
> include depend
> ------------------
>
> I type in command line:
>
> >>make -f myMakefile
> cc -M main.c > depend
> make: 'depend' is up to date.
>
> I assumed that above make produce main.o, but it did. why?

Make only builds the first target specified in the Makefile, unless
you provide a command line target. Try this, for example, with your
Makefile:

$ make main.o

This will build main.o because you specified it as your desired
target. Otherwise make will only build depend because it's the first
target in the Makefile. If you want to have main.o be the primary
target, move your include statement above the rule for building it:

include depend
depend : main.c
        $(CC) -M $(CPPFLAGS) $^ > $@

$ make
Makefile:6: depend: No such file or directory
cc -M  main.c > depend
cc    -c -o main.o main.c

This has the unfortunate side-effect of generating a warning that
there's no such file as depend, but it doesn't matter because GNU make
is smart enough to re-run itself on the same Makefile _after_
generating the file from specified rules, so all your targets get
built. To remove this warning, you can add a dash to the front of the
include line:

-include depend
depend : main.c
        $(CC) -M $(CPPFLAGS) $^ > $@

This causes make to ignore the fact that depend can't be found on the
first pass. The first pass will build depend, then the second pass
will work fine because depend is now there.

Regards,
John