Question

I’m new to cmake and have just started playing around with it. My problem is that when I invoke cmake like in the tutorial it generates a massive amount of files.

Is there a way to invoke cmake so that all is left after is one unix makefile in the root directory of my project?

Answer 1

The files CMake generates are all useful and shouldn’t be deleted.

You could probably write a script which deletes these at the end of running CMake, but I’d strongly recommend that you let CMake work the way it’s designed to.

If you keep your source tree separate from your build tree (do an “out of source build” as CMake calls it), there should be no problems. So e.g.

- project_root_dir
     |
     |- CMakeLists.txt
     |- src_dir

- build_dir

If you cd build_dir, then do cmake ../project_root_dir, all the files CMake generates will be in build_dir and won’t pollute your source tree.