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I am working on a project that has a directory structure that looks a bit like this:

inputs/ a.txt b.txt c.txt outputs/ a.out b.out c.out makefile

The files in the outputs folder are generated from the files in the inputs folder and I want to automatically update them whenever one of the input files changes.

I tried to do this by creating a makefile with a pattern rule. (To keep this question simple, I'm just copying the input file instead of transforming it)

outputs/%.txt: inputs/%.out cp $< $@

However, this makefile didn't quite do what I want. If I run make outputs/a.txt it will apply the rule that I wrote and regenerate the output file if it is outdated but if I just run make then nothing happens:

make: *** No targets. Stop.

Is there a way to tell make that by default I want to generate an output file for every file in the inputs folder?

edit: made the output files have a different file suffix than the input files.

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1 Answer 1

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You would typically do this with a makefile something like this:

IN = $(wildcard inputs/*.txt) OUT = $(subst inputs/,outputs/,$(IN)) outputs/%.txt: inputs/%.txt cp $< $@ default: $(OUT)

This makes the default target (the first one in the file), depend on OUT which is the glob expansion of the existing files in IN with the directory string changed from inputs to outputs.

If you want to change the suffix there are lots of other builtin functions to manipulate the targets. For example you can add an intervening operation:

IN2 = $(addsuffix .out,$(basename $(IN)))

The basename function will remove the trailing .txt, and the addsuffix will add a trailing .out.

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  • What if I want to change the file suffix for the files in the outputs folder to something other than txt? I can't think of a clean way to do that with subst... Commented Dec 6, 2016 at 20:49
  • There are many functions in gnu make. I updated my answer with an example. Commented Dec 6, 2016 at 21:04
  • For anyone who is wondering about "cp $< $@": gnu.org/software/make/manual/html_node/Automatic-Variables.html Commented Aug 11, 2020 at 9:42

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