CHICKEN-DO(1)

📦
version 6.0.0 · 3 versions
, in alpine 3.24, arch rolling, fedora 43, fedora 44, nixos 26.05, nixpkgs unstable

✨ chicken-do — the manual, but make it cute ✨

okay so bestie, welcome to the General Commands Manual page for chicken-do 💖 this is the little make-ish helper from the CHICKEN crew that runs a shell command unless the target already exists and nothing it depends on is newer. it's giving "make but tiny and unbothered". let's get into it 🫶

🌸 NAME 🌸

chicken-do — run a shell command unless the target exists and any dependency is not newer than the target 💅

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

chicken-do [-q] [-h] [--] TARGET ... : DEPENDENCY ... : COMMAND ...

three little groups separated by colons, bestie. targets, then deps, then the command. iconic format honestly ✨

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

So here's the whole vibe: if the files in TARGET ... don't exist, or if any of the files in DEPENDENCY ... are newer than one of the target files, then it goes ahead and executes the shell commands in COMMAND ... 🏃‍♀️💨

Otherwise? Nothing happens. No command. It just minds its business. periodt.

The program accepts the following options:

  • -h — show usage and exit. the "wait what does this do again" button 🙈
  • -q — quiet operation, meaning it does not print shell commands when they are executed. stealth mode 🧚
  • -- — treat all following tokens as target filenames, even if they begin with a - character. so if your filename is out here starting with a dash and being dramatic, this is your girl 💅

💀 EXIT STATUS 💀

The chicken-do utility exits 0 on success, and >0 if an error occurs. no in-between, no chaos, just vibes ✨

🌈 EXAMPLES 🌈

Building a C program from sources, the classic:

$ chicken-do prg: prg.c inc.h: gcc prg.c -o prg

look at that colon usage. target, deps, command. chef's kiss 👑 lowkey elegant fr fr

🍓 SEE ALSO 🍓

chicken(1), chicken-status(1), chicken-install(1), chicken-uninstall(1), csc(1) — the whole friend group, go say hi 🫶

More information can be found in the CHICKEN User's Manual: http://wiki.call-cc.org/manual/index.

👑 AUTHORS 👑

The CHICKEN Team 💖 (yes, all of them, they're the main characters)

💀 BUGS 💀

Submit bug reports by e-mail to chicken-janitors@nongnu.org — they want to hear it, no cap 📧

and that's the page, bestie!! this one came from the Debian build, dated Apr 26, 2017, and it lives at the top of CHICKEN-DO(1) in the manual. slay, go build something 💅✨

📦 where this page comes from