Question

I’m writing a dead simple Makefile to be used with GHCi and gedit. Essentially, I define a module to load, and a function (along with its parameters) to call/test. The Makefile would need to execute GHCi and then pass the necessary commands into it. I tried piping with echo, and it worked in a normal shell, but fails due to the way make handles whitespace, strings & formatting. It feeds the whole thing as as one single line, rather than individual lines of input. On top of that, it is a bit messy.

# Sorry if backslashes are messed up do to tabs...
module   = somemodule
function = somefunction
params = 5 "Hello"

default: *.hs
    echo                \
        :l $(module)        \
                    \
        $(function) $(params)   \
        | ghci          

How could I acheive this cleanly and elegantly? 🙂

Answer 1

Have you tried using two separate echo commands?

( echo ":l $(module)"; echo "$(function) $(params)" ) | ghci