Question

I find it difficult sometimes to locate errors/warnings in large projects upon make-ing (gnu). How do I segregate the errors/warnings from the usual compilation messages when the error does not stop the build process from going any further? A wrapper shell script could pick and display whatever I want, but before fleshing out one I thought of asking about the alternatives.

Thanks.

Answer 1

In theory, make -s will suppress the “routine” output of the build process, leaving you with only the errors and warnings. Also in theory, make will stop as soon as it encounters an error.

If either of those is not true for the project(s) you’re working with, that’s probably due to poorly written makefiles. So fixing the makefiles is one alternative.

To help make sense of verbose builds, some simple highlighting as provided by colorgcc can go a long way. IDEs like eclipse or even emacs can also helpfully pick out the error messages in the build output.

Also, it might be helpful to note that warning and error messages are usually written to stderr, while everything else goes to stdout. So it might be useful to simply discard stdout like so: make >/dev/null.