I have a Makefile that defines a .PHONY clean target for cleaning up .o files and executables, that target looks like:
...
.PHONY : clean
clean:
rm $(add
Late to the party, but here's another solution that worked with our quirky build environment:
if exist *.exe rm -f *.exe
Not output free, but reduced and exits cleanly:
# make clean
if exist *.exe rm -f *.exe
I tried a lot of alternatives that all had issues before settling on this one.
I've given up with rm. The following command will remove files and dirs.
find . -delete
To remove only files or only dirs, there is the -type option:
# remove only files
find . -type f -delete
# remove only dirs
find . -type d -delete
Actually, I've create a little script (based on that snippet) named bomb that removes files without complaining: https://github.com/lingtalfi/bomb
rm -f
will FORCE and not output any error
Use rm -f
(or even better $(RM)
, provided by built-in make
rules, which can be found out using make -p
) instead of rm
in your clean
rule.
When Targets Fail
When a target is executed, it returns a status based on whether or not it was successful--if a target fails, then make will not execute any targets that depend on it. For instance, in the above example, if "clean" fails, then rebuild will not execute the "build" target. Unfortunately, this might happen if there is no core file to remove. Fortunately, this problem can be solved easily enough by including a minus sign in front of the command whose status should be ignored:
clean: -rm -f *.o core
~ http://www.cprogramming.com/tutorial/makefiles.html