Question

I’m trying to make a custom function in a Makefile to detect the current platform and return the proper file accordingly. Here is my attempt.

UNAME := $(shell uname -s)

define platform
    ifeq ($(UNAME),Linux)
        $1
    else ifneq ($(findstring MINGW32_NT, $(UNAME)),)
        $2
    else ifeq ($(UNAME),Darwin)
        $3
    endif
endef

all:
    @echo $(call platform,linux,windows,mac)

It fails with the following error.

/bin/sh: Syntax error: "(" unexpected
[Finished]make: *** [all] Error 2

What am I doing wrong?

Answer 1

Another option would be to concatenate outputs of uname to form a platform string in a certain format and have platform specific makefiles named accordingly:

ARCH := $(firstword $(shell uname -m))
SYS := $(firstword $(shell uname -s))

# ${SYS}.${ARCH} expands to Linux.x86_64, Linux.i686, SunOS.sun4u, etc..
include ${SYS}.${ARCH}.mk