Suppress messages in make clean (Makefile silent remove)

Question

I\'m wondering how I can avoid some echo in a Makefile :

clean:
    rm -fr *.o

this rule will print:

$>make clean   
rm -fr          


        

Answer 1

I'm responding to this ancient topic because it comes up high in search and the answers are confusing. To do just what the user wants,all that is needed is:

clean:
    @rm -f *.o

The @ means that make will not echo that command. The -f argument to rm tells rm to ignore any errors, like there being no *.o files, and to return success always.

I removed the -r from the OPs example, because it means recursive and here we are just rming .o files, nothing to recurse.

There's no need for the 2>&1 >/dev/null because with the -f there will be no errors printed.

.SILENT: clean

works in place of the @, but it isn't at the same place in the Makefile as the command that it affects, so someone maintaining the project later might be confused. That's why @ is preferred. It is better locality of reference.