Question

From some path, I use

PATHS = $(wildcard $(SOME_PATH)/*)

to get all sub-paths.

I need to know whether it’s a file or a directory.

How to do it in make?

Thanks.

Answer 1

John Marshall has a way that will work, but there’s a safer way. All directories always have a single entry that is well known, and that’s “.”. So, what you have to do is:

PATHS := $(wildcard $(SOME_PATH)/*)
DIRS := $(patsubst %/.,%,$(wildcard $(addsuffix /.,$(PATHS))))
FILES := $(filter-out $(DIRS),$(PATHS))

The wildcard will match all directories, and only directories, since only directories contain “.”. This is robust.

Yehnan’s way works as well but is less efficient because you’re invoking a shell for each element in PATHS. Most likely this won’t impact your runtime much overall but if it can be done inside make rather than by running shell, I would prefer that. Also it helps portability to avoid $(shell …).