Question

In a makefile, I have the following line:

helper.cpp: dtds.h 

Which ensures that helper.cpp is rebuilt whenever dtds.h is changed. However, I want ALL files in the project to be rebuilt if either of two other header files change, kind like this:

*.cpp: h1.h h2.h 

Obviously that won’t work, but I don’t know the right way to get nmake to do what I want. Can someone help? I don’t want to have to manually specify that each individual file depends on h1.h and h2.h.

Thanks. (I’m using nmake included with visual studio 2005.)

Answer 1

Thanks for your help, Christoph. I tried:

.cpp.obj: h1.h h2.h 

And got the helpful error message:

makefile(58) : fatal error U1086: inference rule cannot have dependents 

I ended up solving it by making a list of the files that I wanted to compile, and then adding the dependency to the whole list.

files = file1.obj file2.obj file3.obj $(files): h1.h h2.h