4.7. DEFCON 2 – The Number of the Beast

Then there are the makefiles that expect certain commands, such as changing to a different directory, to not affect other commands in a target's creation script. You can solve this is either by going back to executing one shell per command (which is what the -B flag forces PMake to do), which slows the process down a good bit and requires you to use semicolons and escaped newlines for shell constructs, or by changing the makefile to execute the offending command(s) in a subshell (by placing the line inside parentheses), like so:

install :: .MAKE
      (cd src; $(.PMAKE) install)
      (cd lib; $(.PMAKE) install)
      (cd man; $(.PMAKE) install)

This will always execute the three makes (even if the -n flag was given) because of the combination of the :: operator and the .MAKE attribute. Each command will change to the proper directory to perform the install, leaving the main shell in the directory in which it started.

All FreeBSD documents are available for download at http://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/

Questions that are not answered by the documentation may be sent to <[email protected]>.
Send questions about this document to <[email protected]>.