[DblPlusUngood]

A particularly tricky task with GNU make is automatically adding target dependencies on header files and handling updates to them (gcc's -M and -MMD switches). It would be great if the article explained those best practices, too.

[jgrahamc]

https://www.cmcrossroads.com/article/tips-and-tricks-automat...

[AceJohnny2]

Thanks John, your book is the most-referred to on my office shelf ;)

Edit: https://nostarch.com/gnumake (via https://blog.jgc.org/2015/04/the-gnu-make-book-probably-more...)

[nrclark]

+1 for a great book, I bought that book too!

I use the patterns in @jgrahamc's article "Escaping: A Walk on the Wild Side" pretty often. Especially the \n definition, which works great to put on the end of a $(foreach) loop inside of a recipe.

@jgrahamc: Thanks for all you've written on Make over the years.

[mturmon]

I also recommend this book. The series on “meta programming make” is also quite good: http://make.mad-scientist.net/category/metaprogramming/

[jgrahamc]

Ooh. That's great. I had not seen that!

[jgrahamc]

That'a great. Glad it was helpful. If you have any of your own GNU Make tips and tricks please do blog about them!

[Ace17]

Here's all you need to track header file dependencies. Basically, when compiling a .cpp file to generate a .o file, a corresponding .deps file is also generated. And at make startup, we include all the .deps files we find in the bin (output) directory, if there's one.

$(BIN)/%.cpp.o: %.cpp

     $(CXX)  -c $(CXXFLAGS) "$<" -o "$@"

     @$(CXX) -c $(CXXFLAGS) "$<" -o "$@.deps" -MP -MM -MT "$@"

-include $(shell test -d $(BIN) && find $(BIN) -name "*.deps")

[sigjuice]

This tiny Makefile should convey the idea.

    CFLAGS=-MD -MP

    prog: <list of .o files>
        $(CC) -o $@ $^
        
    -include *.d