Makefile cheat sheet

Mostly geared towards GNU make

I've used ->| to indicate a tab character, as it's clearer to read than ⇥

Set a target, its dependencies and the commands to execute in order

target: [dependencies]
->| <shell command>
->| <shell command>
    ...

shell commands are not required. To just list dependencies for a target, use only the first line:

output.o: defs.h

The first target is the default target

This could be all for example, listed together with its dependencies: all: $(TARGET)
Use .PHONY <target> at the start or end of a build step if is not an actual file to be build:

.PHONY: clean
clean:
->| rm -rf *.o $(TARGET)

install:
->| @echo Installing
.PHONY: install

but before is preferred.

Comments are preceeded with #, either at the start of the line, or as end-of-line comments
Lines can be continued across line-breaks by ending a line with a backslash \. Just be aware of accidental spaces after the backslash (simply always removing trailing whitespace).
Set a variable with VARNAME = value Variable values can contains spaces: no need to escape them or quote them. Practical for a list of filenames or compiler flags

Standard variable names:

# C/C++ compiler
CC = gcc  
CXX = g++
# Linker
LD = ld
# Libraries to link with (include '-l')
LIBS = -lm -lpthread
# Compiler and linker flags (warning levels, optimisation level, 
# include debugging symbols, add include search path, add library search path)
CFLAGS = -Wall -Wextra -O2 -g -I./src/include
CXXFLAGS = -Wall -Wextra -O2 -g -I./src/include
LDFLAGS = -L./src/libs
# Object files
OBJS = obj1.o obj2.o obj3.o
# Executable name
TARGET = fancyname

Use a variable with $(VARNAME): dollar sign and enclosed in parentheses.

Single-letter variables can omit the parentheses. This is mainly done for the automatic variables, see below.
prepend shell commands with '@' to suppress printing the command itself. Shell output is still visible. (The @ character has to be at the beginning of the command, directly after the tab.)

Useful for specific echo commands, e.g.

$(TARGET): $(OBJS)
->| @echo "Building target"
->| $(LD) $(LDFLAGS) $(LIBS) ($OBJS) -o $(TARGET)

Parallel builds: make -j to use all available cores make -j2 to use two cores
Automatic variables
- $@: name of the target
- $<: first dependency

main.o: main.cpp defs.h
->| $(CXX) $(CXXFLAGS) $< -o $@

$^: dependencies (prerequisites), separatead by spaces (duplicates are removed)

$(TARGET): $(OBJS)
->| $(CC) $(LDFLAGS) $^ -o $@

$+: as $^, but with duplicates included
$?: all prerequisites that are newer than the target (with respect to their timestamp)

Each of the above automatic variables has two variants: appended with a D, or appended with an F. The former results in the directory name of the relevant variable, the latter in just the filename portion. Surround these with parentheses, since they are longer than 1 character, e.g.: $(<F).

functions

GNU make has a bunch of functions that can be applied to variables. A few are listed here, more in the GNU make manual.
- $(dir file1.txt dir/file2.txt) results in ./ dir/.
- $(notdir file1.txt dir/file2.txt) results in file1.txt file2.txt.
The above two functions can be used instead of the D and F additions in case of automatic variables.
- $(suffix file1.txt) yields .txt. Includes the last dot, and omits results (empty result) from files without an extension.
- $(wildcard *.txt) results in a space-separated list with all .txt files.
$% (GNU extension). This is also an automatic variable, but can be used somewhat differently. It is used in patterns:

%.o: %.c
->| $(CC) -c $(CFLAGS) $< -o $@

This will build an object file for each source file, with a matching filename as output. (Note that with most compilers, -o $@ is not really necessary in this case, since the compiler will automatically replace the extension with .o.)

% is written between a prefix and postfix, either of which can be empty.

The actual "stem" for each match is stored in the $* variable.

If there is no (Unix-style) directory separator '/' in the target name, then only the filename part is matched on; directory names are removed before trying to match. This means that the stem does not contain the directory name, though the final target name and prerequisites do: it's only for the matching.

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Makefile cheat sheet

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