Hi, thanks all for your suggestions, I'm replying directly to Kaz whose solution is working in my hands now....
>> Is it possible using Gnu Make to delete all out of date targets? > >We can do this using text processing around the output of the -d option, >together with a dry run -n. The verbose -d output has the information >about out of date targets. Yes - thanks - I like this approach and will adopt it.... >Example run: > >Let's touch lib.c, making lib.o out of date, and consequently, the txr >executable out of date: > >sun-go:~/txr$ touch lib.c >sun-go:a opt/lib.o, out of date wrt lib.c >removing opt/lib.o, out of date wrt lib.c >removing txr, out of date wrt opt/lib.o > >Now, re-make those targets: > >sun-go:~/txr$ make >CC lib.c -> opt/lib.o >LINK opt/txr.o opt/lex.yy.o opt/y.tab.o opt/match.o opt/lib.o >opt/regex.o opt/gc.o opt/unwind.o opt/stream.o opt/arith.o opt/hash.o >opt/utf8.o opt/filter.o opt/eval.o opt/parser.o opt/rand.o opt/combi.o >opt/sysif.o opt/args.o opt/lisplib.o opt/cadr.o opt/struct.o >opt/itypes.o opt/buf.o opt/jmp.o opt/protsym.o opt/ffi.o opt/strudel.o >opt/vm.o opt/chksum.o opt/chksums/sha256.o opt/chksums/crc32.o >opt/chksums/md5.o opt/tree.o opt/time.o opt/mpi/mpi.o opt/debug.o >opt/syslog.o opt/glob.o opt/ftw.o opt/signal.o opt/socket.o >opt/termios.o opt/linenoise/linenoise.o -> txr > >The rm-ood-targets.txr program runs make -n -d in a hopefully C >locale, so the messages are in English. It looks for messages >indicating out of date targets and extracts the pieces of >text from them: > >sun-go:~/txr$ cat rm-ood-targets.txr >#!/usr/bin/env txr >@(next (open-command `LANG=C LC_ALL=C make -n -d`)) >@(repeat) >Prerequisite '@pre' is newer than target '@targ'. >@(do >(put-line `removing @targ, out of date wrt @pre`) >(remove-path targ)) >@(end) > >This could be cobbed together with some grep job, but I eat my own >dogfood. Looks tasty, but despite being a lover of lisps, m4, regexp, and such, I will refrain from taking the opportunity to learn txr, and will reach for perl to extract the out of date targets, and gnu parallel to iterate over them. Like this: <SomeMakeCommand> -dn | LANG=C LC_ALL=C perl -lne 'print if s|^\s*Prerequisite .* is newer than target .(.*).\.|$1|' | sort -r | uniq | parallel rm > >Note, however that a missing prerequisite is also treated as if the >dependent target is out of date. Understood - that is desirable in my case > >sun-go:~/txr$ rm opt/lib.o >sun-go:~/txr$ ./rm-ood-targets.txr >removing txr, out of date wrt opt/lib.o > >Depending on the parsing of human-readable diagnostics from a tool >isn't the greatest idea on the planet, but in this case, the odds >seem good that the specific messages are quite stable, >and they are delimited by occurring on a separate line. Works for me. > >GNU Make is integrated with the Guile Scheme language, but the >integration is very light; you can't do much with it. > >Suppose that Make's object database were available via Guile API. >A Guile script could then walk the rules, discover out-of-date >targets, and do whatever it wants. This script could then >be integrated into a Makefile. Thanks. I really appreciate your discussion of these considerations. Regards, ~Malcolm >Cheers ...
