Question

I have a directory called project.

It contains two sub-directories called client and server, and a makefile called Makefile.

client and server have got source files called client.c and server.c, respectively.

I don’t have any separate makefiles in the subdirectories for sources belonging to that directory. All builds are done by the single makefile. The Makefile code is

FLAGS = -W -Wall -g -pthread

SERV =./server/server.c      #My server code 
CLI =./client/client.c       #My client code

build:svr cnt

svr: $(SERV) 
    cc $(FLAGS) $(SERV) -o ./server/server.out
cnt: $(CLI)
    cc $(FLAGS) $(CLI) -o ./client/client.out

Now I ran make cnt and it replied

cc -W -Wall -g -pthread ./client/client.c -o ./client/client.out

The problem is all the subsequent make cnt commands end up compiling it again and outputting the above text even though I’m not changing ./client/client.c

I’m stuck here. Don’t know what to do.

What I want to do is:

• With make cnt, compile client/client.c and output its executable in the client/ directory
• With make svr, compile server/server.c and output its executable in server/ directory.
• And with make, compile bothserver/server.candclient/client.c` and output their executables in their respective directories

But since I don’t have any executables called svr and `cnt the problem I am having isn’t solved.

If I change the target to ./client/client.out instead of cnt and then call make client/client.out then it would be fine, exactly what I need but I don’t want to enter long command make client/client.out in my terminal

The workaround I have got is as follows

cnt: $(CLI)
         cc $(FLAGS) $(CLI) -o cnt
         cp cnt ./client/client.out

But not quite satisfied with it. I’m sure what I want to do is really simple and there should be some convenient way around doing it. So how can I do that?

Answer 1

Let’s formulate what you want. You want target named `cnt’ not to be rebuilt. The makefile you’ve written knows nothing about client.out file, because it only appears in shell commands within a rule. Make program doesn’t read information from shell commands, it only does substitutions there and executes them.

When makefile chooses the targets it will rebuild (`cnt’ is one of these targets), it compares update time of a target file with update time of its prerequsites. Since at the time you run “make cnt” the file named cnt is absent, the target named so is considered as requiring update. So commands are run and yield no file named cnt, so next make run will consider it for updating as well.

There are two possible solutions. The first one is to give targets same names as of the file, that the rule commands will generate. So, you might end up like this:

client/client.out: $(CLI)
    cc $(FLAGS) $(CLI) -o ./client/client.out

Your questioin has nothing to do with directories, by the way. You should also read about .PHONY directive, use $(CC) instead of cc and read gnu make manual, which might be very helpful.