Wildcard match on phony targets

Question

In a GNU Makefile, if I use * in a prerequisite or $(wildcard) in an assignment it will use shell expansion to find matching files.

Is there a way to do the equivalent for phony targets? For example:

.PHONY: compile-1 compile-2
compile-all: compile-*

This is similar to this question but I don't want to have to manually list the targets as in AVAILABLE_MODELS.

"No, you have to list them" is an acceptable answer.

In the general case, you might want to enumerate all the targets. This is unfortunately not entirely trivial. See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4219255/how-do-you-get-the-list-of-targets-in-a-makefile — tripleee, Jun 15 '16 at 08:50

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 13 '16 at 18:33

2

You don't have to quite list them. You can compute them from their differences, if that's sufficiently different:-

compiles := $(patsubst %,compile-%,1 2)

PHONY: $(compiles)

compile-all: $(compiles)

See 8.2 Functions for String Substitution and Analysis

However, if compile-N is a phony target for some compilation you ought not to have a phony target for that at all. Compilation makes real files, and they're the targets, no need for phony ones.

On the other hand, compile-all clearly should to be a phony target.

answered Jun 13 '16 at 18:33

Mike Kinghan

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`compile-N` are not real files – OrangeDog Jun 13 '16 at 18:44
@OrangeDog. I appreciate that, but suspected that these each of these recipes *makes* a real file or files that would routinely be made without phony targets. Just a hunch, of course. – Mike Kinghan Jun 13 '16 at 19:07
In my case, I use makefile targets to run some other commands instead of creating shortcuts somewhere else. – Eduardo Reis May 19 '22 at 18:22

Wildcard match on phony targets

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