clean:
    -cmd /c if exist glversion.txt del glversion.txt
    -cmd /c if exist glversion.exe del glversion.exe
    -cmd /c if exist glversion.o   del glversion.o
[download]

By the way, I fixed the file name in the last one.

By the way, I fixed the file name in the last one.

Yeah ... I was wunderin' how come glversion.o never got removed :-)

Your solution works fine, btw - thanks. At some stage (in a rare moment of enlightened inspiration) I also got around to trying:

clean:
    -if exist "glversion.txt" del "glversion.txt"
    -if exist "glversion.exe" del "glversion.exe"
    -if exist "glversion.o"   del "glversion.o"
[download]

and that works, too. I was surprised that those double quotes would have such a marked effect on the way that the commands are parsed.

Reading through the rest of the thread I'm struck with the notion that TMTOWTDI .... which would be sooooo typical of this place :-)

Thanks guys.

Cheers,
Rob

I was surprised that those double quotes would have such a marked effect on the way that the commands are parsed.

system does the same thing in Perl. The presence of shell meta characters forces the invocation of the shell.

Isn't the if exist file del file syntax from the nmake example simply executing the standard cmd.exe if exist built-in command?

And so, for the dmake example, could you not convert that to an equivalent syntax, that the default command processor it uses, understands?

For example, for sh, you might use test -f file && unlink file or similar.

The rules in make scripts are executed in the default shell - overrideable by an appropriate setting of the SHELL macro in the make script.

BTW, in your example, if you use test -f ... in a make rule and the file doesn't exist, make(1) will abort since it traps all non-success error codes and quits.

The prefixing of any line with a -, avoids this.

Update Using straight shell i.e. no perl available, I tend to use shell expansion together with a case statement - which returns no status, thus avoiding upsetting make(1) - so in this case ...

target:
    case "filename*" in \
        \*) : ;; \
         *) rm file ;; \
    esac
[download]

Of course if you're using sh, the easiest solution is to use rm -f file...

HTH ,

At last, a user level that overstates my experience :-))

Personally, I try to avoid using the shell whenever I have a supposedly functional Perl available:

$PERL -e "for(@ARGV){-f and unlink or warn qq(Can't delete $_: $!)}" g
+lversion.txt glversion.exe glversion.o
[download]

I think this version should even be fairly safe against shells that interpolate $, as the variables only appear in the error message part.

clean:
    rm -f glversion.txt glversion.exe glversion.o
[download]

The -f option tells rm (among other things) that it's not an error if some of the files don't exist. Maybe there's a similar option for del?

Another way is it let the command fail, and ignore the failure by prepending a dash to the command:

clean:
   - rm glversion.txt glversion.exe glversion.o
[download]

This way rm will fail if some of these files don't exist, but make will ignore that error. Again I don't know if the various make dialects understand that.

To me it seems overkill to both add the leading dash and have the if exists in the makefile.

Except that rm is not available under Windows. If you don't want to use my hand-rolled Perl solution, ExtUtils::Command has the rm_f subroutine which does what my oneliner does, except likely better:

perl -MExtUtils::Command -e rm_f glversion.txt glversion.exe glversion
+.o
[download]