11 Portable Make Programming

Writing portable makefiles is an art. Since a makefile's commands are executed by the shell, you must consider the shell portability issues already mentioned. However, other issues are specific to make itself.

• $< in Ordinary Make Rules: $< in ordinary rules
• Failure in Make Rules: Failing portably in rules
• Special Chars in Names: Special Characters in Macro Names
• Backslash-Newline-Newline: Empty last lines in macro definitions
• Backslash-Newline Comments: Spanning comments across line boundaries
• Long Lines in Makefiles: Line length limitations
• Macros and Submakes: make macro=value and submakes
• The Make Macro MAKEFLAGS: $(MAKEFLAGS) portability issues
• The Make Macro SHELL: $(SHELL) portability issues
• Comments in Make Rules: Other problems with Make comments
• obj/ and Make: Don't name a subdirectory obj
• make -k Status: Exit status of ‘make -k’
• VPATH and Make: VPATH woes
• Single Suffix Rules: Single suffix rules and separated dependencies
• Timestamps and Make: Subsecond timestamp resolution