Create directories using make file

Question

I\'m a very new to makefiles and i want to create directories using makefile. My project directory is like this

+--Project  
   +--output  
   +--source  
           


        

Answer 1

make in, and off itself, handles directory targets just the same as file targets. So, it's easy to write rules like this:

outDir/someTarget: Makefile outDir
    touch outDir/someTarget

outDir:
    mkdir -p outDir

The only problem with that is, that the directories timestamp depends on what is done to the files inside. For the rules above, this leads to the following result:

$ make
mkdir -p outDir
touch outDir/someTarget
$ make
touch outDir/someTarget
$ make
touch outDir/someTarget
$ make
touch outDir/someTarget

This is most definitely not what you want. Whenever you touch the file, you also touch the directory. And since the file depends on the directory, the file consequently appears to be out of date, forcing it to be rebuilt.

However, you can easily break this loop by telling make to ignore the timestamp of the directory. This is done by declaring the directory as an order-only prerequsite:

# The pipe symbol tells make that the following prerequisites are order-only
#                           |
#                           v
outDir/someTarget: Makefile | outDir
    touch outDir/someTarget

outDir:
    mkdir -p outDir

This correctly yields:

$ make
mkdir -p outDir
touch outDir/someTarget
$ make
make: 'outDir/someTarget' is up to date.

---

TL;DR:

Write a rule to create the directory:

$(OUT_DIR):
    mkdir -p $(OUT_DIR)

And have the targets for the stuff inside depend on the directory order-only:

$(OUT_DIR)/someTarget: ... | $(OUT_DIR)