Learn Makefiles
make and Makefiles are powerful tools, but sometimes a bit special to work with if you are not exposed to them regularly.
make reports something is not up to date
I am using make for my TIL collection to consolidate some of the things I often do, so I have targets for:
- Monitoring some stats for the collection
- Running a spell checker
- Running a Markdown linter
The file currently look as follows:
.PHONY: stats markdown spelling
stats:
ls **/*.md | entr ./check_til.pl
markdown:
markdownlint .
spelling:
spellchecker.sh
Do note this file is changes since my Markdown is not so welcoming to tab and Makefiles uses tabs.
Anyway I observed the error:
make markdown
make: `markdown' is up to date.
I had to list the “markdown” target to .PHONY
This is the explanation:
Maybe you have a file/directory named test in the directory. If this directory exists, and has no dependencies that are more recent, then this target is not rebuild. To force rebuild on these kind of not-file-related targets, you should make them phony as follows:
REF: StackOverflow: “Why does make think the target is up to date?”.