RE: how to allow multiple empty commands?

[Mark Galeck (CW)]

Thank you Paul!

>I don't know what "a SSCCE" is, but if you say so, I won't ask why.

Take a look at sscce.org


> Is there a way to do this?  My attempts are below:

> is an obscure rule mentioned in the manual, that says in
> case of multiple commands for files starting with a ".", make would
> not complain.  But it still does !  why is the rule not followed??

>I'm not aware of any such statement; can you quote it or at give us some
>hint where it is?  Maybe you misinterpreted it?

Could very well be  I misunderstood something.  Here is:

Section 4.11 Multiple Rules for One Target
(...)
If more than one rule gives commands for the same file, make uses the last set 
given and prints an error message. (As a special case, if the file's name 
begins with a dot, no error message is printed. This odd behavior is only for 
compatibility with other implementations of make... you should avoid using it).
(...)

> but this seems not so great, because it seems from the manual, that
> make would actually go around and execute all these empty commands
> (you realize that I have thousands of them in the realistic example,
> and thousands of such targets, so the speed matters, I think).  Would
> it?

>It will... except that make has special case code and detects if the
command it would invoke is the empty string (or similar "do nothing"
commands) and won't actually invoke a shell to process the empty string.
It will, however, walk all the targets expanding the recipe strings

Yes indeed, I noticed it is walking all these millions of them, not good for me 
:)  can't have ::
Right now by best choice is to use :; and pipe the warnings to a black hole 
(these are only make warnings, which are of no interest to programmers using my 
make).  Seems to work OK, but I would probably prefer to prepend with . if 
possible.