Make "make" default to "make -j 8"

Question

Is there a way that I can make

$ make

default to:

$ make -j 8

?

Thanks!

Answer 1

alias make="make -j 8", assumin bash shell

Answer 2

If you are using the command line you can do:

alias make='make -j 8'

This will be temporary, to make it permanent you need to add it to .bashrc

Read here: http://www.linfo.org/make_alias_permanent.html

Answer 3

Why not create an outer makefile, that calls another makefile like this, this is replicated from the manual here.

     SUBDIRS = foo bar baz
     .PHONY: subdirs $(SUBDIRS)
     subdirs: $(SUBDIRS)
     $(SUBDIRS):
             $(MAKE) -j 8 -C $@

     foo: baz

Hope this helps, Best regards, Tom.

Answer 4

The answers suggesting alias make='make -j 8' are fine responses to your question.

However, I would recommend against doing that!

By all means, use an alias to save typing - but call it something other than make.

It might be OK for whatever project you're currently working on; but it's quite possible to write makefiles with missing dependencies which do not quite work properly with -j, and if you encounter such a thing, you'll be left wondering why the build fails in a mysterious way for you but works fine for other people.

(That said, if you do alias make, you can get bash to ignore the alias by typing \make.)

Answer 5

Set the environment variable MAKEFLAGS to "-j 8". If you are using csh or tcsh, you can do this with "setenv MAKEFLAGS '-j 8'". If you are using bash, you can do this with "export MAKEFLAGS='-j 8'". You might wish to put this command in your shell's start-up file, such as .cshrc or .bashrc (in your home directory).

Caution: Setting a default like this will apply to all invocations of make, including when you "make" a project other than your own or run a script that invokes make. If the project was not well designed, it might have problems when it is built with multiple jobs executing in parallel.