Pardon the cryptic title, but I don't know the correct terminology...
I want to write Makefile that starts out by downloading a file from a remote site, but the obstacle I'm facing is that the name of the downloaded file is not known at the time of writing the Makefile; it changes over time. The only thing that remains constant is a suffix. E.g. at various times, the downloaded file may be 123_foo.tgz, 786_foo.tgz, 2110_foo.tgz, etc. I can write the rule for performing this download, but I can't figure out how to write rules that work with the resulting download. Just to be concrete, suppose the rule for download is something like this: download: wget -N ftp://ftp.foobar.org/latest/*_foo.tgz and assume that the directory ftp.foobar.org/latest always contains exactly one file matching the pattern *_foo.tgz, though the full name of this file changes over time. (BTW, the -N flag tells wget to download a file only if its latest-modification time is more recent than the one for a local copy of the same file, but I guess I don't need to explain this to this crowd :) .) OK now, how would I write a rule to run "tar xzf" on this downloaded file *only if* it was "just downloaded"? This doesn't sound like such an unusual situation but I'm thoroughly stumped. For one thing, the directory resulting from running "tar xzf" on a fresh download doesn't even exist yet, since its name would have the form *_foo for some novel value of *, so make could not compare the latest modification times of the new download against that of this hypothetical directory... Help! TIA, kj -- NOTE: In my address everything before the first period is backwards; and the last period, and everything after it, should be discarded. _______________________________________________ help-gnu-utils mailing list help-gnu-utils@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-gnu-utils