Re: make does not stop when a command returns an error

[Cédric Lucantis]

> > Hi,
> >
> > i think i need to track this down a bit further, but can anybody
> > see why "make" should continue to go even when i call a perl
> > script in a rule and that script does an "exit(-1)" ?
> >
> > In front of that rule i don't have any "-".
>
> If you showed us the rule we could be a lot more help.
>
> Without any further information, we can't say for sure; we can only
> guess.  One common mistake is that the command that fails is not the
> last command in the script that make runs, so make doesn't see it.  For
> example, if you have:
>
>     foo:
>       perl -e myscript; do_something_else
>
> then if the perl command fails make doesn't see that; make will only see
> the exit code of the do_something_else command.  If you have multiple
> commands in make you should ALWAYS either put them on separate lines:
>
>     foo:
>       perl -e myscript
>       do_something_else
>
> or else if you don't want to do that you should use the && operator
> between all your commands:
>
>     foo:
>       perl -e myscript && do_something_else
>
>
> Another problem, that is much harder to solve, is pipes: the shell will
> use the exit code of the final command as the exit of the shell, so:
>
>     foo:
>       perl -e myscript | do_something_else
>
> also won't see any exit code from the perl script.

Another obscure problem is when the target of the failing command is an 
included makefile (with -include). As your talking about dependencies, it's 
probably your problem here. For instance, the following will (strangely) 
always success:

all:
        echo "hello"

depends.d:
        false

-include depends.d

-- 
Cédric Lucantis