Re: learning make

[Stephan Beal]

On Wed, Jul 8, 2009 at 6:14 PM, Payal <address@hidden> wrote:

On Wed, Jul 08, 2009 at 08:50:32AM -0400, Paul Smith wrote:
> People use make for all sorts of tasks that have absolutely nothing to
> do with programming: updating web sites, creating documentation,
> performing backups, and a whole host of other things we probably would
> never think of.

wow! can you cite a few more places where else it can be used?
With warm regards,
-Payal

Hi! At this site:

http://wanderinghorse.net/computing/make/

i maintain an updated copy of "Managing Project with GNU Make, 3.Xth Edition". In that document you'll find some ideas. As Paul mentioned, it's used for all kinds of things. The things i use it for, not including compiling source code:

- converting images using the ImageMagick family of tools.
- making backups (see the above link)
- generating documentation from external input (doxygen, latex, etc.)
- to figure out inter-process relationships in non-computing process, e.g. when dealing with internal business processes with 100+ steps it's sometimes helpful to pack all of the steps into a makefile and let Make figure out which steps can be performed in parallel.

e.g. to create a .jpg file from a .png file using the "convert" tool (part of ImageMagick), you just need a two-line makefile:

%.jpg: %.png
    convert $^ $@

then:

make my.jpg

will create my.jpg from my.png (which must exist in that directory)

-- 
----- stephan beal
http://wanderinghorse.net/home/stephan/