How to call Makefile from another Makefile

Question

I m getting some unexpected results calling one makefile from another   I have two makefiles  one called  path to project makefile and one called  path to project gtest-1 4 0 make Makefile   I m attempting to have the former call the latter   In  path to project makefile  I have  dev    OBJ FILES      CPPC    LIBS    FLAGS DEV    OBJ FILES  -o   BIN DIR    PROJECT      MAKE  -f   gtest-1 4 0 make Makefile  clean    rm -f        gmon out   core   SRC DIR       OBJ DIR    o   rm -f    svn-commit tmp    rm -f   BIN DIR    PROJECT    make -f gtest-1 4 0 make Makefile clean   And in  path to project gtest-1 4 0 make Makefile I have  all    TESTS   clean    rm -f   TESTS  gtest a gtest main a   o   Issuing the following   cd  path to project make   Outputs   make -f   gtest-1 4 0 make Makefile make 1   Entering directory   path to project  make 1   Nothing to be done for  all   make 1   Leaving directory   path to project    However  when I issue these commands   cd  path to project make clean   I see   make -f gtest-1 4 0 make Makefile clean make 1   Entering directory   path to project  rm -f  gtest a gtest main a   o make 1   Leaving directory   path to project    I don t understand  In both cases   path to project makefile is telling me it s entering the current working directory   In the first case  it doesn t think it has work to do  when it does  and in the second case  it s able to find the appropriate directive  when the output is telling me it s looking in the wrong directory  yet it tries to run the rm command in  path to project  instead of  path to makefile gtest-1 4 0 make    Am I missing something fundamental to calling makefiles from one another   Have I made an egregious conceptual mistake  or hit a common pitfall   How do I effectively change directories and call a second makefile from within the first   My understanding was that simply calling make -f  lt name gt  would be enough   This is make gmake 3 81 in bash

User · Accepted Answer

I m not really too clear what you are asking  but using the -f command line option just specifies a file - it doesn t tell make to change directories  If you want to do the work in another directory  you need to cd to the directory   clean      cd gtest-1 4 0  amp  amp    MAKE  clean   Note that each line in Makefile runs in a separate shell  so there is no need to change the directory back

User · Answer

It seems clear that   TESTS  is empty so your 1 4 0 makefile is effectively  all    clean    rm -f  gtest a gtest main a   o   Indeed  all has nothing to do   and clean does exactly what it says rm -f gtest a

User · Answer

http   www gnu org software make manual make html Recursion   subsystem           cd subdir  amp  amp    MAKE    or  equivalently  this     subsystem             MAKE  -C subdir

User · Answer

Instead of the -f of make you might want to use the -C  lt path gt  option  This first changes the to the path   lt path gt    and then calles make there   Example   clean    rm -f        gmon out   core   SRC DIR       OBJ DIR    o   rm -f    svn-commit tmp    rm -f   BIN DIR    PROJECT      MAKE  -C gtest-1 4 0 make clean

[makefile] How to call Makefile from another Makefile?

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