MAKE-FI...-TARGET(1)

💖 NAME 💖

okay so the tool is called make-first-existing-target 🎀 and it runs make on whichever one of several targets actually exists ✨ — "runs make on one of several targets" is the whole vibe bestie 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

make-first-existing-target [-c cmd] target1 [target2 ...] --
[make-options]

✨ DESCRIPTION ✨

okay so here's the tea 🍵 make(1) is kinda difficult when you know a Makefile probably has one of several standard target names, and you want your build machinery to run exactly one of them and pass along any errors 😭 the problem is make(1) will exit 2 if a target doesn't exist, but an existing target can also exit 2 because of some other failure 💀 so you can't tell the difference!!

and it's not like you can just parse Makefiles to find the targets either. you'd need something at least as Turing-complete as make itself 🤯 make also doesn't give you any way to list the targets in a Makefile. it might not even be possible to enumerate targets without actually running part of the Makefile 🙈 (proof is left as an exercise for the reader, obviously 💅)

this program dodges all of that drama 🫶 it tries to call each specified target in turn, and stops as soon as it sees make actually doing something for one of them ✨ main character energy fr 👑

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -c cmd — pick the make command to run 🔧 if you don't set it, it's just "make" 💜

🦋 EXIT STATUS 🦋

ngl this one's simple 💅 the exit status is 0 if at least one target existed and ran successfully. otherwise you get a nonzero status 🥲

🧚 AUTHOR 🧚

Joey Hess <joey@kitenet.net> 💕

🌈 LICENSE 🌈

same as GNU make, no cap 🫶

⭐ SEE ALSO ⭐

make(1) 🍓

bestie, that's the whole thing 💖 this page came from the perl v5.18.2 docs, dated 2014-05-13, filed under MAKE-FI...-TARGET(1) 🎀 slay the build pipeline and go touch some grass 🌸✨