Question

I have a bunch of directories with C programs. I need to compile them one by one and use the result in the main Program.

So my Main program traverse in the Directory structure [I am not sure what the structure is, It may change over time] and compiles one C program at a time, use that result in some computation.

So If I write the main program in C and use nftw to traverse.

OR

Write a Shell main program.

Which appraoch is better?

Answer 1

I guess you use a compatible Unix/Linux/Cygwin system….

Therefore, I would advice to use a shell solution because it is more suitable for directory processing.

Makefile for each program

As @Dogbert said make can be used to build several programs. Build can be performed in parallel (using the option -j). Moreover make can also take care about the dependencies.

I do not know if you are used with Makefile syntax. Therefore I give a quick example about a program requiring three C files and one header file:

program: file1.o file2.o file3.o
    gcc -o -o $@ $^

%.o: %.c header.h
    gcc -c -o $@ $< 

The following command will compile file1.c, file2.c and file3.c in parallel. Then link stage will wait for the completion of these tree compilations.

make -j3

Directory discovery

The following command finds each Makefile and runs the make command:

find . -name Makefile -exec make -j3 -f '{}' ';' 2>&1 | tee result.txt

If you have 8 cores in your computer, you can use -j8.

Reuse in your main program

The build result is displayed on the shell screen and is also stored in the result.txt file.

More information?

I do not know what is your system, or your knowledge. Hope this can help. If you are not sure to understand some parts, please ask for more information. 😉