[Groff] Typesetting with groff from Makefiles

[Jörgen Grahn]

One thing that has puzzled me for quite a while:

What's the best trick for dealing with groff (troff, nroff ...) from within
a Makefile?

As far as I can see, groff always typesets to standard output, which means
things like

  foo.ps: foo.ms
       groff -ms foo.ms > foo.ps

will always generate foo.ps, even when there are fatal errors. On the other
hand,

  foo.ps: foo.ms
       groff -ms foo.ms > foo.ps || $(RM) foo.ps

will not leave a bad foo.ps around, but it will not abort the make session
either, since either groff or $(RM) will always return success.

I'm sure someone here has found the neatest possible way of addressing this.

BR,
Jörgen

-- 
  // Jörgen Grahn       "Koka lopplummer, bada Ross, loppor borta."
\X/ <address@hidden>                                   -- Jonas