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c++makefilebitcoin

Recompiling does not reflect changes

I am attempting to make a simple change to the bitcoin core codebase locally but my changes are not reflected after recompilation. Below are the steps to reproduce the issue:

Clone the bitcoin source code:

git clone https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.git
cd bitcoin

Edit: src/rpc/rawtransaction.cpp and change something (anything). Here I just put "HELLO WORLD" in the signrawtransactionwithkey method as shown below and left everything else the same:

static RPCHelpMan signrawtransactionwithkey()
{
    return RPCHelpMan{"signrawtransactionwithkey",
            "\n HELLO WORLD Sign inputs for raw transaction (serialized, hex-encoded).\n"
... <code continues> ...

Recompile:

./autogen.sh
./configure
make -j 16

make command output:

Making all in src
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin/src'
make[2]: Entering directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin/src'
make[3]: Entering directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin'
make[3]: Leaving directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin'
  CXXLD    qt/bitcoin-qt
  CXXLD    test/fuzz/fuzz
  CXXLD    qt/test/test_bitcoin-qt
make[2]: Leaving directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin/src'
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin/src'
Making all in doc/man
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin/doc/man'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for 'all'.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin/doc/man'
make[1]: Entering directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin'
make[1]: Nothing to be done for 'all-am'.
make[1]: Leaving directory '/home/bitcoinfacts/bitcoin'

Run the signrawtransactionwithkey command:

./src/bitcoin-cli signrawtransactionwithkey

The output does not include HELLO WORLD:

error code: -1
error message:
signrawtransactionwithkey "hexstring" ["privatekey",...] ( [{"txid":"hex","vout":n,"scriptPubKey":"hex","redeemScript":"hex","witnessScript":"hex","amount":amount},...] "sighashtype" )

Sign inputs for raw transaction (serialized, hex-encoded).
... <output continues> ...

Why? What I am I doing wrong?

Solution

  • The reason was that I had to kill and restart bitcoind because that's where the change actually was (not bitcoin-cli, as I previously thought. Duh!)