Adding comments to Makefile

Question

How do I add comments (with echo) in a Makefile so that they\'re printed when ran?

Answer 1

You should use

target:
     @echo "Building!"

Note the @, which tells Make not to display the command itself. Without this the output would look like:

echo "Building!"
Building!

Answer 2

Visual C++ nmake has the !message text... preprocessing directive. I have not used GNU make, so I don't if it has it as weel, but quick search shows it has the $(info text...) function.

And inside command blocks you can use echo.

Answer 3

Since a makefile mostly contains commands to be run when building specific targets, I'd say you use just that: echo.

Answer 4

Or, since Make just pushes whatever is in a rule to bash, you could just use a pound to have bash treat it as a comment.

Rule:  Dependencies
    # Your Comment
    Command

Will output

$ make Rule
    # Your Comment
    Command

Answer 5

all :
    echo "Building!"
    $(CC) $(OBJECTS) $(LPATH) $(LIBS) -o $(PROGRAM)