How to split up path names in gnu make? - gnu-make

In GNU Make, I have a requirement to obtain the name of the parent directory of the directory my makefile is running in.
For example, if the makefile is /home/fnord/foo/bar/Makefile, I want to set a variable to the string "foo".
I can do this using some of the GNU Make built in functions, shown here all split up for clarity.
V1=$(CURDIR)
V2=$(dir $(V1))
V3=$(subst /, ,$(V2))
V4=$(lastword $(V3))
This seems complex for such a simple requirement, but I can't find a better way. Are there any better techniques for splitting up pathnames in GNU Make?
I need this to work in GNU Make version 3.81 and later.

Because of the way the $(dir ...) function works in GNU make, it's not as nice as it could be, but it's better than the above (IMO):
V4 = $(notdir $(patsubst %/,%,$(dir $(CURDIR))))
The idea behind leaving the trailing slash is to allow joins (making the operation reversible), but in my experience this ends up not being very useful in practice, and having to strip the trailing slash is a PITA. However, it is what it is and there's far too much history to change it now.
ETA:
If you like you can make a function that works more like the shell's dirname and use call:
dirname = $(patsubst %/,%,$(dir $1))
V4 = $(notdir $(call dirname,$(CURDIR)))

Related

How to make a single makefile that applies the same command to sub-directories?

For clarity, I am running this on windows with GnuWin32 make.
I have a set of directories with markdown files in at several different levels - theoretically they could be in the branch nodes, but I think currently they are only in the leaf nodes. I have a set of pandoc/LaTeX commands to run to turn the markdown files into PDFs - and obviously only want to recreate the PDFs if the markdown file has been updated, so a makefile seems appropriate.
What I would like is a single makefile in the root, which iterates over any and all sub-directories (to any depth) and applies the make rule I'll specify for running pandoc.
From what I've been able to find, recursive makefiles require you to have a makefile in each sub-directory (which seems like an administrative overhead that I would like to avoid) and/or require you to list out all the sub-directories at the start of the makefile (again, would prefer to avoid this).
Theoretical folder structure:
root
|-make
|-Folder AB
| |-File1.md
| \-File2.md
|-Folder C
| \-File3.md
\-Folder D
|-Folder E
| \-File4.md
|-Folder F
\-File5.md
How do I write a makefile to deal with this situation?
Here is a small set of Makefile rules that hopefuly would get you going
%.pdf : %.md
pandoc -o $# --pdf-engine=xelatex $^
PDF_FILES=FolderA/File1.pdf FolderA/File2.pdf \
FolderC/File3.pdf FolderD/FolderE/File4.pdf FolderD/FolderF/File5.pdf
all: ${PDF_FILES}
Let me explain what is going on here. First we have a pattern rule that tells make how to convert a Markdown file to a PDF file. The --pdf-engine=xelatex option is here just for the purpose of illustration.
Then we need to tell Make which files to consider. We put the names together in a single variable PDF_FILES. This value for this variable can be build via a separate scripts that scans all subdirectories for .md files.
Note that one has to be extra careful if filenames or directory names contain spaces.
Then we ask Make to check if any of the PDF_FILES should be updated.
If you have other targets in your makefile, make sure that all is the first non-pattern target, or call make as make all
Updating the Makefile
If shell functions works for you and basic utilities such as sed and find are available, you could make your makefile dynamic with a single line.
%.pdf : %.md
pandoc -o $# --pdf-engine=xelatex $^
PDF_FILES:=$(shell find -name "*.md" | xargs echo | sed 's/\.md/\.pdf/g' )
all: ${PDF_FILES}
MadScientist suggested just that in the comments
Otherwise you could implement a script using the tools available on your operating system and add an additional target update: that would compute the list of files and replace the line starting with PDF_FILES with an updated list of files.
Final version of the code that worked for Windows, based on #DmitiChubarov and #MadScientist's suggestions is as follows:
%.pdf: %.md
pandoc $^ -o $#
PDF_FILES:=$(shell dir /s /b *.md | sed "s/\.md/\.pdf/g")
all: ${PDF_FILES}

GNU make pattern rules with different file base names

I have a data processing job that I would like to automate with Make. Hundreds of files need to be processed, in several steps.
Unfortunately, the base name will change for at least one of the steps, but it would be easy to write these dependencies into a separate file that then is included.
However, I'd like to avoid also writing the build instructions (which are quite complicated) for all these files separately.
I envisage something along these lines:
# automatically generated rules, included into make file
dir1/test.bb: dir2/test_other_name.aa
# (many more rules like the above, linking xxx.bb to yyy.aa)
# pattern rule
%.bb: %.aa
# build step using $# $>
What I would like is the pattern rule to provide the rules, and the explicit rule defining the dependencies. Can something like this be achieved?
When make's noddy patterns don't cut the mustard,
just write out the rules explicitly.
(This has the happy side effect of not using pattern rules.)
Let's say you have a function src-to-target which will generate the target filename (i.e., $(call src-to-target,dir2/test_other_name.aa) expands to dir1/test.bb.
Also, you have a list of sources in ${srcs}, and ${recipe} is a list of shell commands using $#, $< etc.
define src-to-target = ... # $1:source
define recipe =
echo Building $# from $<
⋮
endef
define generate-rule = # $1:source
target := $(call src-to-taget,$1)
targets += $${target}
$${target}: $1 ; $${recipe}
endef
$(foreach _,${srcs},$(eval $(call generate-rule,$_)))
.PHONY: all
all: ${targets} ; : $# Success
The $(foreach ...) does all the work here.
So, looking at that in painful detail,
First expand ${srcs}
Set $_ to the first in the list (dir2/test_other_name.aa say)
Expand $(call generate-rule,$_)
Expand $(call generate-rule,dir2/test_other_name.aa)
$1 is set to dir2/test_other_name.aa, and the expansion of $(generate-rule) follows, leading to this block of text
target := dir1/test.bb
targets += ${target}
${target}: dir2/test_other_name.aa ; ${recipe}
As a side effect, $(eval) swallows the above text. The expansion of the $(eval) though is empty.
$_ is set to the next source file.
Wash, lather, rinse, repeat
Once the $(foreach) is complete,
${targets} contains the complete list of targets.
Parallel safe too.
What's not to like?

How to rename multiple filenames in cshell script?

I have a c shell script which has the following two lines, it creates a directory and copies some files into it. My question is the following - the files being copied look like this abc.hello, abc.name, abc.date, etc... How can i strip the abc and just copy them over as .hello, .name, .date.. and so forth. I'm new to this.. any help will be appreciated!
mkdir -p $home_dir$param
cp /usr/share/skel/* $home_dir$param
You're looking for something like basename:
In Bash, for example, you could get the base name, file suffix like this:
filepath=/my/folder/readme.txt
filename=$(basename "$filepath") # $filename == "readme.txt"
extension="${filename##*.}" # $extension == "txt"
rootname="${filename%.*}" # $rootname == "readme"
ADDENDUM:
The key takeaway is "basename". Refer to the "man basename" page I linked to above. Here's another example that should make things clearer:
basename readme.txt .txt # prints "readme"
"basename" is a standard *nix command. It works in any shell; it's available on most any platform.
Going forward, I would strongly discourage you from writing scripts in csh, if you can avoid it:
bash vs csh vs others - which is better for application maintenance?
Csh Programming Considered Harmful

GNU `ls` has `--quoting-style` option, what's the equivalent in BSD `ls`

I will use ls output for pipe input, so I need to escape the file name. when I use GNU ls, It works well. what's the equivalent in BSD ls? I hoping the output is like this.
$ gls --quoting-style escape t*1
text\ 1 text1
Why are/were you trying to use ls in a pipeline? You should probably be using find (maybe with -print0 and xargs -0, or -exec).
I suppose you could use ls -1f and then run the output through vis (or some similar filter) with some appropriate options to add the necessary quoting or escaping of your choice, but without knowing what you are feeding filenames into, and what (if any) other options you would want to use with ls, it's impossible to give much better guidance.
From the freebsd man page on ls there is no such option, however, you can try -m which will give you a comma separated streamed output:
-m Stream output format; list files across the page, separated by
commas.
I tried it on osx and it gave me:
$ ls -m
Hello World, Hello World.txt, foo.txt
That is a lot easier to parse from a script.

How can I implement the command 'ls' with wildcard, '*'?

EDIT #1 : I'm under the limit that all arguments are enclosed in two quotes, so that shell do not expand any argument with * to the corresponding path.
EDIT #2 : In order to retrieve directories such as */*, ../*, and dirA/*/file.out, How should I use iteration loop or recursive call?
I have just learned about the function fnmatch(). But I don't know start place.
There are many possible cases. I'm confused dealing with these all cases.
For example, Let me assume that executable program is a.out.
$./a.out -l */*
$./a.out -l ../*
$./a.out -l [file_name] [directory_name]
/* Since I also have to implement ls command with no wildcard. */
What should I do? Any advice would be awesome.
Thank you in advance.
Your problem is : shell replaces wildcard caracter * with all of the filenames matching the pattern.
Solution:
If you do not want to use this feature of bash, just put quotation marks around your command line arguments.
Calling your program that way will have the original arguments, containing wildcards.
After this, you can list all the filenames with their paths. For example using some recursive algorithm. Then you can apply some matching to these path string. (when visiting it)
If you want to be a good unix citizen, the rule is Don't do filename globbing unless you are writing a shell.
You want to write an ls-like program? Don't do any wildcard expansion. Don't treat "*" specially. Just treat your argv as a list of filenames. If your program handles these cases:
./a.out file1
./a.out file1 file2 file3
Then it will also handle
./a.out file*
correctly because the shell will do the expansion and your program won't need to know about it. And besides that, it will handle this:
zsh% ./a.out **/file<40-185>~file<90-100>(.mm-30OL[1,2])
which in zsh expanded glob syntax means: expand file40 through file185, except for file90 through file100, include only the ones that have been modified in the last 30 minutes, and use only the largest 2 files in the resulting set.
fnmatch is never going to do anything like that. But these fancy globs can be used with any command that just takes a filename list and doesn't care where it came from.
When you're in a situation where you can't take a list of filenames from the command line, then consider using fnmatch. ls isn't one of those situations.

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