Question

I have a makefile in the project root directory. If I am editing a file in a subdirectory, how do I invoke make from EMACS? M-x compile make will not work as it looks for the makefile in the current directory. But I have the makefile in the project root directory.

Any thoughts?

Edit

As suggested, make -f fullpath_to_makefile did the trick. But I have some includes in the makefile like include “tests/module.mk” which failed. It is looking for “tests” directory in the subdirectory. This can be solved by specifying fully qualified path in the makefile. But I don’t think that is a good solution. Any better approaches?

Answer 1

The M-x compile function looks up the compile-command-variable which you can override on the promt — so just replace it with something like

(cd ../.. && make && cd -)

and let that run.

I also often use a file header (in line 1) such as

// -*- compile-command: "g++ -o myprog myprog.ccc -lfoo -lbar && ./myprog"; -*-

which you can generalize at will with different options. After reloading the file, M-x compile will execute your custom compile command which I find quite useful.