Establishing 'make clean' with GNU make

I've been reading up on how to get GNU make to 'make clean' no matter what, with no success. I have the following fragment in both makefiles:

Code:

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.PHONY: clean FORCE
clean: FORCE
        rm *.o outliner
FORCE:

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make still gives the following error when I try to use these rules:

Code:

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make: *** No rule to make target `clean'.  Stop.

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Help, please?

By the way, I'm only using this when I specify a different interface (CLI or GUI) to the bash wrapper. A different macro must be passed to GCC for all sources so everything must be recompiled whether it changed or not. (Well, not all sources depend on the macro but I'm not sure I should change the makefiles to only send it to some.) If there's any better way to do this, please do tell.

Thanks!

here's my 2c

Code:

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.PHONY: clean
clean:
        rm *.o outliner

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There's no practical difference between the two snippets; I actually used that one first, then found another technique that might help. Obviously, it didn't...

Either of the posted bits should work. Are you by any chance having spaces instead of a tab on the line after clean:?

And I expect you do not have a file called clean?

--
Mats

Using a dependency "FORCE" adds more lookups and typing effort. Check if there is a file named "clean" in the directory from which you are invoking "make clean".

Mats: No, that's a tab right before the rm command.

itC: Nope, I don't have a 'clean' file.

Here's the current makefile, in case it helps:

Code:

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# Makefile
CC = gcc `pkg-config --cflags --libs gtk+-2.0` -D INTERFACE=0
CFLAGS = -ggdb -ansi -lm
OBJECTS = main.o interface.o outline.o ../Jesdisciple/filesystem.o ../Jesdisciple/list.o ../Jesdisciple/toolkit.o

.PHONY:        clean
clean:
        rm *.o outliner

outliner: $(OBJECTS)
        $(CC) -o $@ $^ $(CFLAGS)

main.o: main.c interface.h

interface.o: interface.c interface.h
interface.h: outline.h

outline.o: outline.c outline.h
outline.h: ../Jesdisciple/filesystem.h

include ../Jesdisciple/Makefile

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Quote:

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Originally Posted by matsp

Are you by any chance having spaces instead of a tab on the line after clean:?

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I've gotten stung this way before. If you use syntax highlighting in vim, it recognizes makefiles and uses lines to indicate the issue (must be tabs!)

I think the snippet in the OP's post has a tab in it, though, not spaces.

Quote:

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By the way, I'm only using this when I specify a different interface (CLI or GUI) to the bash wrapper. A different macro must be passed to GCC for all sources so everything must be recompiled whether it changed or not. (Well, not all sources depend on the macro but I'm not sure I should change the makefiles to only send it to some.) If there's any better way to do this, please do tell.

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One thing I suppose you could do is to put the .o files for the CLI into a different directory from the .o files for the GUI. That way, if you switch to compiling another interface, you'll have to recompile everything; but if you then switch back again, you'll hardly have to compile anything.

That's the best solution I can think of if you don't want to make only certain files get recompiled when the interface changes (which would also be a good solution, though perhaps harder to implement).

Could you post your entire Makefile so that we can examine it?
[edit] I see you did just that while I was typing up this post.

This might sound like a stupid question, but do all of your Makefiles have clean targets? Perhaps the Makefile that you're actually executing with "make" doesn't have a clean target . . . . [/edit]

dwk, that's a good idea... For the bash file, it's a good bit simpler than the file-I/O solution I'd come up with, but the makefiles are the other end of the trade-off. I posted the working makefile above, so here's the new one, moved to the CLI subdirectory... (The GUI makefile is identical except the final 0 on the first line is a 1.)

Code:

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# Makefile
CC = gcc `pkg-config gtk+-2.0 --cflags --libs` -D INTERFACE=0
CFLAGS = -ggdb -ansi -lm
OBJECTS = main.o interface.o outline.o ../../Jesdisciple/filesystem.o ../../Jesdisciple/list.o ../../Jesdisciple/toolkit.o

.PHONY: clean
clean:
        rm *.o outliner

outliner: $(OBJECTS)
        $(CC) -o $@ $^ $(CFLAGS)

main.o: ../main.c ../interface.h

interface.o: ../interface.c ../interface.h
../interface.h: ../outline.h

outline.o: ../outline.c ../outline.h
../outline.h: ../../Jesdisciple/filesystem.h

include ../../Jesdisciple/Makefile

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Here are the resulting errors:

Code:

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gcc `pkg-config gtk+-2.0 --cflags --libs` -D INTERFACE=0 -o outliner main.o interface.o outline.o ../../Jesdisciple/filesystem.o ../../Jesdisciple/list.o ../../Jesdisciple/toolkit.o -ggdb -ansi -lm
gcc: main.o: No such file or directory
gcc: interface.o: No such file or directory
gcc: outline.o: No such file or directory
make: *** [outliner] Error 1

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Since the makefiles are being so screwy, I just put the rm command directly in the bash wrapper so I don't need to 'make clean'. I wonder if this behavior is part of the decay of my Ubuntu. Ever since I updated via the repositories rather than a Live CD, it's been doing strange things.

Thanks!