Question

Is it possible to have make create a temp directory before it executes the first target? Maybe using some hack, some additional target etc.?

All commands in the Makefile would be able to refer to the automatically created directory as $TMPDIR, and the directory would be automatically removed when the make command ends.

Answer 1

I seem to recall being able to call make recursively, something along the lines of:

all:     -mkdir $(TEMPDIR)     $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) old_all     -rm -rf $(TEMPDIR)  old_all: ... rest of stuff. 

I’ve done similar tricks for calling make in subdirectories:

all:     @for i in $(SUBDIRS); do \         echo "make all in $$i..."; \         (cd $$i; $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) all); \     done 

Just checked it and this works fine:

$ cat Makefile all:     -mkdir tempdir     -echo hello >tempdir/hello     -echo goodbye >tempdir/goodbye     $(MAKE) $(MFLAGS) old_all     -rm -rf tempdir  old_all:     ls -al tempdir  $ make all mkdir tempdir echo hello >tempdir/hello echo goodbye >tempdir/goodbye make  old_all make[1]: Entering directory '/home/pax' ls -al tempdir total 2 drwxr-xr-x+ 2 allachan None 0 Feb 26 15:00 . drwxrwxrwx+ 4 allachan None 0 Feb 26 15:00 .. -rw-r--r--  1 allachan None 8 Feb 26 15:00 goodbye -rw-r--r--  1 allachan None 6 Feb 26 15:00 hello make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/pax' rm -rf tempdir  $ ls -al tempdir ls: cannot access tempdir: No such file or directory