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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-10T18:02:54+00:00

I use the following Makefile section: .PHONY: all all: _MyModule.so _%.so: %.pb.cc %.pb.h python

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I use the following Makefile section:

.PHONY: all
all: _MyModule.so

_%.so: %.pb.cc %.pb.h
    python setup.py build

%.pb.cc %.pb.h: %.proto
    protoc --cpp_out=. $^  # Generate these two files together

I would expect make to create the _MyModule.so file and remove the intermediates MyModule.pb.cc and MyModule.pb.h. What happens in practice is that only one of the files is deleted(.h or .cpp). I also noticed that it depends on the order of their appearance in the _%.so dependencies list.

Could anyone explain this behavior?

How could I elegantly remove all the intermediates?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    How peculiar. I’ll go out on a limb and say this looks like a bug in GNUMake. A pattern rule with multiple targets has special behavior, and it seems that this behavior doesn’t dovetail correctly with the treatment of intermediate files (and .INTERMEDIATE doesn’t help).

    I wouldn’t call this an elegant solution, but it works:

    %.pb.cc: %.pb.h
    @:

%.pb.h: %.proto
    ...

    P.S. Turns out this is a known bug.

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