What's the best way to move a directory into place in a Makefile install?

Question

I'm currently using the usual technique in my Makefile to install individual files:

install:
    install -D executable ${BIN_DIR}

But I just ran across a situation where I need to move a whole directory and all files underneath it into place.

Is cp -r the best way or is there a more linux-y/unix-y way to do this?

Answer 1

Yeah, it's hard to think of a more unix-ish way that cp -r, although the -r is a relatively late addition to cp. I can tell you the way we used to do it, and that works neatly across filesystems and such:

Let src be the source directory you want to move, and /path/to/target be an absolute path to the target. Then you can use:

$ tar cf - src | (cd /path/to/target; tar xf -)

Answer 2

My version of install(1) (Debian) has:

   -d, --directory
          treat all arguments as directory names; create all components of the specified directories

   -t, --target-directory=DIRECTORY
          copy all SOURCE arguments into DIRECTORY

So if you wanted to use install(1) consistently throughout your Makefile you could do:

install -d destdir
install srcdir/* -t destdir

-t isn't recursive however - if srcdir contains directories, then they won't get copied.

Answer 3

Linking is another viable alternative. That would allow you to keep multiple directories (representing different versions) accessible.