Question

I am writing a smallish C program for fun. I decided to just use MinGW (only C), make and Notepad++ as an exercise in not using fancy IDEs for a change. So far so good and fun.

(MinGW == I am working on Windows.)

Now since the program compiles against vanilla C I thought of making it fully portable. MinGW make and gcc is smart enough create a program from the rule:

myprog: myprog.o other.o
    $(CC) $(CFLAGS) $(LDFLAGS) $^ -o $@

Obviously, since I am on windows the compiler creates myprog.exe. This is quite smart and makes the entire thing quite portable.

As far as standard targets go I want to at least implement clean since I actually use that rule. Now the clean target, that actually works on Windows looks like this:

clean:
   rm myprog.exe *.o

This rule will definitely not work in a POSIX environment, because programs don’t have extensions there. (PSOIX: think GNU/Linux)

Is there a portable way implement a clean without to much make fu?

So far I have not found any really useful documentation around this issue. If you look at how autoconf and automake tackle the issue, they introduce the pattern @EXEEXT@. But that relies on lengthy configure code testing the environment.

Answer 1

If solved it the following way:

UNAME = $(shell uname -o)
ifeq ($(UNAME), Msys)
  EXEEXT = .exe
endif

clean:
    rm *.o myprog$(EXEEXT)

It solved the issue quite nicely. Although it is not totally 100% portable it works most common cases.