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makefilesuppress

Getting Quiet Make to echo command lines on error

I have a Makefile building many C files with long long command lines and we've cleaned up the output by having rules such as:

.c${MT}.doj:

        @echo "Compiling $<";\
         $(COMPILER) $(COPTS) -c -o $@ $<

Now this is great as the @ suppresses the compilation line being emitted. But when we get an error, all we get is the error message, no command line. Can anyone think of a "neat" way to emit the command line? All I can think of doing is echoing it to a file and have a higher level make catch the error and cat the file. Hacky I know.

Solution

  • Tested and it worked (GNU make in Linux):

    .c${MT}.doj:
     @echo "Compiling $<";\
          $(COMPILER) $(COPTS) -c -o $@ $<  \
          || echo "Error in command: $(COMPILER) $(COPTS) -c -o $@ $<" \
          && false