Portable makefile creation of directories

Question

I\'m looking to save myself some effort further down the line by making a fairly generic makefile that will put together relatively simple C++ projects for me with minimal m

Answer 1

Windows mkdir always does what Unix mkdir does with the -p switch on. And you can deal with the backslash problem with $(subst). So, on Windows, you want this:

$(BIN_DIR) $(OBJ_DIR):
        mkdir $(subst /,\\,$@)

and on Unix you want this:

$(BIN_DIR) $(OBJ_DIR):
        mkdir -p -- $@

Choosing between these is not practical to do within a makefile. This is what Autoconf is for.

As a side note, never, ever use the @command feature in your makefiles. There will come a day when you need to debug your build process on a machine you do not have direct access to, and on that day, you will regret it.