Question

I have a makefile with some targets (say data1 through dataN, on which alldata depends) that generate some data, and a prettify target which iterates over the output and creates a pretty report. (note: there are lots of dataN targets and the makefile is machine-generated)

Some of the dataX targets occasionally fail, but I would like to run prettify anyway, so prettify doesn’t depend on alldata.

Is there a way to run the equivalent of make -k alldata || make prettify in a single invocation of make such that make does a best-effort at building all the data, and then builds my report on whatever got made?

Answer 1

You can prepend the recipes for the dataX targets with a ‘-’,
or you can list the dataX targets as prerequisites of the special target .IGNORE.