Questions about make -C in SunOS

UNIX Solaris
1

I am using a SunOS to compile a project. The Makefile contains commands "$(MAKE) -C $$dir". However, in "man make" there is no -C option. I tried using MAKE=gmake but it failed too. My questions:

  1. The make options for this SunOS is different from the gnu make options. Is it because of the difference between the BSD make and GNU make, I wonder?

  2. Could I rewrite make -C $$dir as:
    cd dir; \
    make; \
    cd ..
    ?

Thanks.

2

gnumake man page does show a -C option.

Does the software require you use gnumake? If so, then you can probably get it at www.sunfreeware.com (listed under make-xxx (xxx=version)

3

Thanks for your reply.

> gnumake man page does show a -C option.

Yes, in

http://www.mcsr.olemiss.edu/cgi-bin/man-cgi?make

I saw from "OPTIONS"

  -C dir
        Change to directory dir before reading  the  makefiles  or  doing
        anything  else.   If  multiple  -C options are specified, each is
        interpreted relative to the previous one: -C / -C etc is  equiva-
        lent  to  -C /etc.  This is typically used with recursive invoca-
        tions of make.

From the description, I think my way to simulate this option (in my question 2) is OK.

> Does the software require you use gnumake?

Not actually. The project I use has a Makefile.common for linux as well as one for SunOS. However the Makefile which is shared by both contains "make -C". Thus I think probably it's because linux has -C support for make, which may come from GNU make.

4

[fx:later] When I try to use gmake, I got this problem:

>>> $ gmake clean
>>> gmake[1]: *** /xxx/yyy/currentdir: Is a directory. Stop.

The program does not seem to run at all. "/xxx/yyy/currentdir" is the current directory, and is defined in Makefile.common:

  "BASE = /xxx/yyy/currentdir"

The only use of $(BASE) is

  "BASE_DIR = $\(BASE\)/zzz"

I could not figure out why this makes gmake stop.

5

There are different versions of make. The version under SunOS is probably called sun make. The most popular one is gmake, GNU make. The version under BSD is still different.