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Multiple Targets

Gaston Sanchez

Learning Objectives

  • Defining multiple targets
  • Get to know the all target
  • Write a Makefile with various targets

More than one target

So far we’ve been working with makefiles containing only one target:

target: dependencies ...
    commands
    ...

However, we can have multiple rules, each one with its own target:

target1: dependencies ...
    commands
    ...

target2: dependencies ...
    commands
    ...

Example

Consider any of the first two examples (e.g. 01-minimal/ or 02-various-dependencies/). In these examples, there’s only one generated output file: output.html.

We can use pandoc to create files in other formats rather than just html. For example, here are three rules that take the same input file, but produce outputs in different formats (html, latex, reStructuredText)

# from markdown to html
output.html: input.md
    pandoc input.md -s -o output.html

# from markdown to latex
output.tex: input.md
    pandoc input.md -s -o output.tex

# from markdown to reStructuredText
output.txt: input.md
    pandoc input.md -t rst -s -o output.txt

If you open the command line and run make, Make will execute just the first target (this is the default behavior of Make).

To run a specific target, call the make command followed by the name of the target you want to be generated. So, if you want to create the latex file, here’s how to call make

make output.tex

If you want to generate the reStructuredText:

make output.txt

The all target

When you have several output files (like in the example above), sometimes you may want Make to execute them all without having to call make on each single output.

To tell Make to run several rules, you can use the all target. This is one of the special target names that Make recognizes and treats it in a very specific way.

Here’s the content of a Makefile that includes an all: target as the first rule. Because the target all is the first target, calling make will execute this rule by default:

# all
all: output.html output.tex output.txt


# from markdown to html
output.html: input.md
    pandoc input.md -s -o output.html

# from markdown to latex
output.tex: input.md
    pandoc input.md -s -o output.tex

# from markdown to reStructuredText
output.txt: input.md
    pandoc input.md -t rst -s -o output.txt

Note that the target all has three dependencies (i.e. the output files), but has no associated command.

So how does Make know what to do with this rule? Well, Make takes the dependencies, and then look at the rest of targets to see if they are part of the all’s dependencies.

all is one of the standard targets in Make, and most users use it to compile the entire program. When you use all, it should be the default target.