Running `make` from anywhere
Run commands from your `Makefile`, even if you're nested deeply!

Sometimes while I’m deep inside mgmt’s project directory, I want to run an operation from the Makefile which lives in the root! Unfortunately, if you do so while nested, you’ll just get:

james@computer:~/code/mgmt/resources$ make build
make: *** No rule to make target 'build'.  Stop.

I figured I’d hack out a quick solution. What I came up with looks like this:

#!/bin/bash
# James Shubin, 2018
# run `make` in the first directory (or its parent recursively) that it works in

MF='Makefile'	# looks for this file, could look for others, but that's silly
CWD=$(pwd)	# starting here

while true; do
	if [ -e "$MF" ]; then
		make $@		# run make!
		e=$?
		cd "$CWD"	# go home first
		exit $e		# pass on the exit status
	fi

	# stop if we get home
	if [ "$(pwd)" = "$HOME" ]; then
		cd "$CWD"
		exit 2		# the exit status of `make` when it errors
	fi

	#echo "searching..."
	cd ..			# go up one dir
done

You can probably figure it out quite easily from the code, but what this does is it searches upwards until it finds a Makefile, and then runs your command from there!

I saved that into a file named pmake, made it executable (chmod u+x pmake) and put it into my ~/bin/. You can download it from here instead.

One problem with this solution is that if you have an intermediate Makefile which is in a parent folder of where you’re working, then it will stop the search there, instead of continuing upwards. One potential solution to this is to name those files GNUmakefile instead, since they will continue to work as normal, but won’t get found by this script. In my use cases, I only ever split up Makefile’s into intermediate layers for compartmentalization and readability, and I can almost always invoke anything important from the root.

You’d expect that this doesn’t support the magical bash completion that comes with a normal Makefile. Strangely, and due to nothing that I did, it seems to just work! I type pmake <tab> and I see the correct completions!

This happens because of clever bash completion engineering and one coincidence.

1. Clever bash completion engineering: To build the bash completion for make, the shell (via a completion script) actually calls make -npq __BASH_MAKE_COMPLETION__=1 -C . .DEFAULT which is a magic incantation which actually asks make to parse the Makefile, and return a bunch of information which can then be used to automatically build clever bash completion targets. You can run it yourself to see the output. (I won’t paste it here because it’s enormous.) As a result, when we invoke our pmake script and press <tab>, the shell actually runs it secretly, and our script passes the magic incantation to the real make, which returns the necessary information. You can observe this by adding:

   echo "MAKE: $@" >> /tmp/whatever

   to the top of the script, and then running a tail -F /tmp/whatever to see our script getting called when you press <tab> a few times.

2. The coincidence: So why does this work? Our script is pmake, and it would be bad if the shell always ran -npq every time we pressed tab on a binary. As a result, the bash completion package only does this for make, although they also hook up pmake, gmake, gnumake, colormake, and _make. source So it was pure coincidence that I chose a script named pmake. Had I written a script named pmake which launched nuclear missiles every time you ran it with -npq (-n for nuclear missiles, -p for max payload active, and -q for a quiet stealth attack) then we’d be in serious trouble the moment someone tried to use tab completion!

   Apparently pmake is the name of a make like command on *BSD, and the legacy is present in the GNU package. Turns out BSD is occasionally useful ;)

Thanks to the commentors which pointed me to the pmake entry in the source!

Happy Hacking,

James

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March 10, 2018
730 words

• technical