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cmakecmake-gui

determine whether cmake is executing from terminal or gui

In CMakeLists.txt, is there a way to know whether the file was executed from a terminal or via a gui (of some form, e.g. ccmake or cmake-gui)? CMAKE_COMMAND and CMAKE_EDIT_COMMAND are both populated regardless of whether I am running cmake or ccmake.

I was searching through the variables and these two seemed the most promising. I have become enamored with colorizing cmake output, the many wonderful answers there have their drawbacks. Namely, I can either get:

  1. It works as expected in a terminal, but there are escape sequences in ccmake.
  2. It works as expected in a terminal, but the ccmake terminal is overwritten by colorized output (LOL).

Just curious if there is a way to determine this in the CMakeLists.txt. There were variables for script mode (-P) that seemed potentially helpful, but I think I would first need to know which executable (cmake or ccmake) called my CMakeLists.txt in the first place.

Solution

  • As far as I know, there is no way to distinguish whether the code was invoked from CMake or from CMake-gui. The code should behave in the same way, everything else would be a surprise for the user.

    You could try to detect whether an instance of CMake-gui is running, but this is error-prone and is not justified for real use cases.