Question

I’d like to execute my Makefile from a bash script file using make/gmake depending on the system it is being compiled on: gmake on FreeBSD (not the standard make) and make on others. For that I would like to determine if the make command installed on the system is GNU make:
– if GNU make then compile with make
– if not GNU make then compile with gmake (and raise error if gmake is not installed)

Is there an easy way of doing this?

Answer 1

if make --version | grep "^GNU Make" >& /dev/null
then
  MAKE=make
else
  MAKE=gmake
fi

${MAKE} ...

EDIT: Changed –ver to –version