How to generate list of make targets automatically by globbing subdirectories?

Question

I would like to use a single Makefile to generate targets in hundreds of subdirectories. Each subdirectory is a date/time stamp like this: 20120119_153957, whic

Answer 1

In your example glob matching is performed by the shell.

GNU Make has the built-in wildcard function, which you can use as follows:

SUBDIRS := $(wildcard ????????_??????)

Now you can use this variable to construct a list of targets:

.PHONY : all
all : $(SUBDIRS:%=%/graph.pdf)

%/graph.pdf : # list prerequisites here.
    # recipe to make '$@' in directory '$(@D)' from '$^'.

See also: pattern rules, automatic variables.