MKDEP(1)

✨ NAME ✨

mkdep — construct Makefile dependency list

okay so welcome to mkdep(1) from the General Commands Manual — she constructs Makefile dependency lists, and honestly? iconic behavior. 💅

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

mkdep [-aDdiopqv] [-f file] [-P prefix] [-s suffixes] -- [flags] file
      ...

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

mkdep takes a set of flags for the C compiler and a list of C source files as arguments, and constructs a set of include file dependencies which are written into the file .depend. bestie, it's giving automatic dependency homework but make it make. ✨

An example of its use in a Makefile might be:

CFLAGS= -O -I../include
SRCS= file1.c file2.c

depend:
    mkdep -- ${CFLAGS} ${SRCS}

where the macro SRCS is the list of C source files and the macro CFLAGS is the list of flags for the C compiler. macros being main characters, periodt. 🫶

The options are as follows:

• -a — Append to the output file, so that multiple mkdep's may be run from a single Makefile.
• -D — Post process (as -d) but read the list of filenames from stdin.
• -d — Post process and merge previously created (for example by cc -MD x.c) depend files into a single file.
• -f — Write the include file dependencies to file, instead of the default .depend.
• -i — When -d or -D is used, instead of inlining the contents of the files to the resulting depend file, use include statements to include the source dependency files.
• -o — Add an additional .OPTIONAL line for each dependent file.
• -P — Prepend the string given in prefix to every target filename. This is useful for programs that have source files in multiple subdirectories and a single Makefile that references all of them explicitly (without using the VPATH functionality because there can be files with the same name in each subdirectory).
• -p — Cause mkdep to produce dependencies of the form:

program: program.c

so that subsequent makes will produce program directly from its C module rather than using an intermediate .o module. This is useful for programs whose source is contained in a single module. -p is equivalent to specifying a null suffix with -s.

• -q — Do not print a warning for inaccessible files when -d is given.
• -s — Expand each target filename to a list, replacing the .o suffix with each element of suffixes. The list of suffixes may be space or comma separated.
• -v — print debugging output.

🎀 FILES 🎀

• .depend — File containing list of dependencies.

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

cc(1), cpp(1), make(1)

🌈 HISTORY 🌈

The mkdep command appeared in 4.3BSD-Tahoe.

💀 BUGS 💀

Some characters special to make(1), most notably the comment character, are not escaped correctly if they appear in file names. This can lead to unparseable output or silently cause dependencies to be lost.

real talk: that's a whole warning. if your filenames are doing the most with make(1) special characters, mkdep might hand you unparseable output or silently lose dependencies. not the vibe. 😭

kisses and clean dependency graphs, Debian 💖 — page date March 4, 2013, MKDEP(1) out. 🎀