Hello Philip,
Yes that is(.DEFAULT) is serving my purpose well. Thanks for the pointer.
What I meant by an invalid target was a target that is not to be found anywhere
in the Makefile. I basically wanted to
replicate a shell kind of scenario whereby if the user enters an invalid option
to the shell script program the shell script
program emits a helpful message.
In make what I seeing was a terse one-liner:
make: *** No rule to make target `wrong_target' ***. Stop.
Thanks,
Rakesh
Sharma
> Date: Sun, 19 Aug 2012 12:33:24 -0700
> Subject: Re: generating helpful message when an invalid target specified
> From: guent...@gmail.com
> To: sharma...@hotmail.com
> CC: help-make@gnu.org
>
> On Sat, Aug 18, 2012 at 11:31 AM, Rakesh Sharma <sharma...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > I am a new user of Make & my question is whether is it possible to generate
> > a help sort of a message,
> > or maybe, have a help target in the makefile, then when an invalid target
> > is specified, make should
> > just run the "make help" target.
>
> I don't know what you mean by "invalid target", but the .DEFAULT
> target might be a step towards what you want. To quote the info
> pages:
>
> `.DEFAULT'
> The recipe specified for `.DEFAULT' is used for any target for
> which no rules are found (either explicit rules or implicit rules).
> *Note Last Resort::. If a `.DEFAULT' recipe is specified, every
> file mentioned as a prerequisite, but not as a target in a rule,
> will have that recipe executed on its behalf. *Note Implicit Rule
> Search Algorithm: Implicit Rule Search.
>
> The downside is that you'll need to list all valid prerequisites as
> targets somewhere.
>
>
> Philip Guenther
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