Question

In my GNUmakefile, I would like to have a rule that uses a temporary directory. For example:

out.tar: TMP := $(shell mktemp -d)
        echo hi $(TMP)/hi.txt
        tar -C $(TMP) cf $@ .
        rm -rf $(TMP)

As written, the above rule creates the temporary directory at the time that the rule is parsed. This means that, even I don’t make out.tar all the time, many temporary directories get created. I would like to avoid my /tmp being littered with unused temporary directories.

Is there a way to cause the variable to only be defined when the rule is fired, as opposed to whenever it is defined?

My main thought is to dump the mktemp and tar into a shell script but that seems somewhat unsightly.

Answer 1

In your example, the TMP variable is set (and the temporary directory created) whenever the rules for out.tar are evaluated. In order to create the directory only when out.tar is actually fired, you need to move the directory creation down into the steps:

out.tar : 
    $(eval TMP := $(shell mktemp -d))
    @echo hi $(TMP)/hi.txt
    tar -C $(TMP) cf $@ .
    rm -rf $(TMP)

The eval function evaluates a string as if it had been typed into the makefile manually. In this case, it sets the TMP variable to the result of the shell function call.

edit (in response to comments):

To create a unique variable, you could do the following:

out.tar : 
    $(eval $@_TMP := $(shell mktemp -d))
    @echo hi $($@_TMP)/hi.txt
    tar -C $($@_TMP) cf $@ .
    rm -rf $($@_TMP)

This would prepend the name of the target (out.tar, in this case) to the variable, producing a variable with the name out.tar_TMP. Hopefully, that is enough to prevent conflicts.