Bugs in the AT&T Toolchest program 'nmake'

[Andrew Hume]

In article <17678 at mimsy.UUCP>, dbk at mimsy.UUCP (Dan Kozak) writes:
> This may only show my naivete, but has anyone implemented a make that
> uses the actual contents (i.e. a CRC or other checkvalue) to compute
> whether something should be re-made?  In fact, you could first send
> the file thru one of the many "de-commenting" programs that were
> floating around comp.lang.c a few months ago, if you didn't want a
> file recompiled when you just changed the comments. (and some people
> thought those programs were useless :-)


mk can support this (but it costs you cycles).
the syntax is (mk sticks per rule attributes between double colons)

goo:Pcmp:	foo
	put your commands here

the semantics are that when mk wants to know if goo is out of date w.r.t.
foo, it sh -c's whatever string comes after P and terminated by the traling :.
a non-zero exit status means it is out-of-date. so in the above example,
goo is up to date if it is the same as foo, independent of any datestamps.