Makefile prefixes

Another thing in a long list of things I wish I had known before:
Commands in makefiles can take prefixes:

, and

suppresses exit status. Great for a

make clean

that looks like:

123	clean: -rm -rf *.o -rm -rf $(TARGET)

This is lovely because often you don't care if a command fails - you don't care if your object files were already deleted, you want to make sure, and you don't want an exit with a failure just because there's nothing to delete.

simply means: don't print this command when you execute it. For example, when your command is to print something, you don't need to also print the command to print something.

basically negates the switches

-n

-t

, and

-q

which tell make not to actually run. So if you want to launch a make command with a flag telling it not to run, stick a + sign in front and it will, in fact, execute. Nifty way to take a debugging/testing command, test it, then actually run it if it looks good.

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Ches Koblents