Tutorial: A Little Help With nmake

Abstract

Alcatel-Lucent nmake is a Unix program that builds other programs. It's powerful and popular, but getting started can be difficult. This paper is written for beginners and will help you learn about nmake without tackling difficult problems. When you finish you'll understand simple makefiles and have a background that will let you make good use of the nmake manuals.

Table of Contents

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1. Introduction

2. An Example
2.1 Background
2.2 Getting Started
2.3 Running nmake
2.4 The Noise
2.5 Another Assertion
2.6 Some Easy Mistakes
2.7 Variables
2.8 Variable Expansion
2.9 A Look Back

3. Extra Files
3.1 The Objectfile
3.2 The Statefile
3.3 The Lockfile

4. Comments
4.1 Some Comments About Comments

5. The Package
5.1 cpp
5.2 The License File
5.3 Makerules.mk
5.4 Scanrules.mk

6. Special Atoms
6.1 What's Wrong?
6.2 .FORCE
6.3 .VIRTUAL

7. Programming nmake
7.1 print
7.2 error
7.3 include
7.4 .MAKE

8. Promises
8.1 .INIT
8.2 .ARGS
8.3 .MAIN

9. A Program - Finally
9.1 Three Source Files
9.2 And A Makefile
9.3 A Better Makefile

10. Viewpathing
10.1 A Source Node
10.2 An Empty Node
10.3 VPATH
10.4 A Build In An Empty Node
10.5 A Build With A Local Source File

11. Common Actions
11.1 Install
11.2 Clobber
11.3 Clean

12. Conclusion

Appendix