In my original jobserver implementation, I filled the job pipe with up to 256 bytes, numbers from 0-255. The idea being that then make could distinguish each job with a unique ID number. That idea got thrown away when we decided to raise the limit to PIPEBUF (4096 on traditional Unix, much larger now on Linux).
I'm looking for a way to expose a job ID number to the individual jobs, in a consecutive range from 1-[number of jobs]. Not just unique numbers, for that we could just use $$ already. The purpose is to e.g. assign non-overlapping network port numbers when firing off a number of client/server test scripts in parallel. Is there anything that could do this now, exposed as a Make variable? -- -- Howard Chu CTO, Symas Corp. http://www.symas.com Director, Highland Sun http://highlandsun.com/hyc/ Chief Architect, OpenLDAP http://www.openldap.org/project/