Test whether a directory exists inside a makefile

Question

In his answer @Grundlefleck explains how to check whether a directory exists or not. I tried some to use this inside a makefile as follow:

foo.b         


        

Answer 1

Act upon the absence of a directory

If you only need to know if a directory does not exist and want to act upon that by for example creating it, you can use ordinary Makefile targets:

directory = ~/Dropbox

all: | $(directory)
    @echo "Continuation regardless of existence of ~/Dropbox"

$(directory):
    @echo "Folder $(directory) does not exist"
    mkdir -p $@

.PHONY: all

Remarks:

• The | indicates that make shouldn't care about the timestamp (it's an order-only-prerequisite).
• Rather than write mkdir -p $@, you can write false to exit, or solve your case differently.

If you also need to run a particular series of instructions upon the existence of a directory, you cannot use the above. In other words, it is equivalent to:

if [ ! -d "~/Dropbox" ]; then
    echo "The ~/Dropbox folder does not exist"
fi

There is no else statement.

Act upon the presence of a directory

If you want the opposite if-statement this is also possible:

directory = $(wildcard ~/Dropbox)

all: | $(directory)
    @echo "Continuation regardless of existence of ~/Dropbox"

$(directory):
    @echo "Folder $(directory) exists"

.PHONY: all $(directory)

This is equivalent to:

if [ -d "~/Dropbox" ]; then
    echo "The ~/Dropbox folder does exist"
fi

Again, there is no else statement.

Act upon both the presence and the absence of a directory

This becomes a bit more cumbersome, but in the end gives you nice targets for both cases:

directory = ~/Dropbox
dir_target = $(directory)-$(wildcard $(directory))
dir_present = $(directory)-$(directory)
dir_absent = $(directory)-

all: | $(dir_target)
    @echo "Continuation regardless of existence of ~/Dropbox"

$(dir_present):
    @echo "Folder $(directory) exists"

$(dir_absent):
    @echo "Folder $(directory) does not exist"

.PHONY: all

This is equivalent to:

if [ -d "~/Dropbox" ]; then
    echo "The ~/Dropbox folder does exist"
else
    echo "The ~/Dropbox folder does not exist"
fi

Naturally, the wildcard expansion might be slower than an if-else-statement. However, the third case is probably quite rare and is just added for completeness.