Question

I’m making a Makefile that moves an output file (foo.o) to a different directory (baz).

The output file moves as desired to the directory. However since make won’t recompile the output file if I type make again, mv gets an error when it tries to move the non-existent empty file to the directory baz.

So this is what I have defined in my rule make all after all compilation:

-test -e "foo.o" || mv -f foo.o ../baz

Unfortunately, I’m still getting errors.

Answer 1

+@[ -d $(dir $@) ] || mkdir -p $(dir $@)

is what I use to silently create a folder if it does not exist. For your problem something like this should work

-@[ -e "foo.o" ] && mv -f foo.o ../baz