Make/makefile progress indication!

Question

Look at this makefile, it has some sort of primitive progress indication (could have been a progress bar).

Please give me suggestions/comments on it!

---

# BUILD is initially undefined
ifndef BUILD

# max equals 256 x's
sixteen := x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x
MAX := $(foreach x,$(sixteen),$(sixteen))

# T estimates how many targets we are building by replacing BUILD with a special string
T := $(shell $(MAKE) -nrRf $(firstword $(MAKEFILE_LIST)) $(MAKECMDGOALS) \
            BUILD="COUNTTHIS" | grep -c "COUNTTHIS")

# N is the number of pending targets in base 1, well in fact, base x :-)
N := $(wordlist 1,$T,$(MAX))

# auto-decrementing counter that returns the number of pending targets in base 10
counter = $(words $N)$(eval N := $(wordlist 2,$(words $N),$N))

# BUILD is now defined to show the progress, this also avoids redefining T in loop
BUILD = @echo $(counter) of $(T)
endif

# dummy phony targets

.PHONY: all clean

all: target
    @echo done

clean:
    @rm -f target *.c

# dummy build rules

target: a.c b.c c.c d.c e.c f.c g.c
    @touch $@
    $(BUILD)

%.c:
    @touch $@
    $(BUILD)

---

All suggestions welcome!

Answer 1

Nice trick! (-:

But not really scalable for growing projects that are distributed across many directories with lots of makefiles.

I'd be more inclined to have logging sprinkled through the [Mm]akefiles* in your project and use that to keep track of progress.

Just a thought. BTW Thanks for sharing this.

Edit: Just had a thought. This could be useful in a modified form to display a throbber to show progress while a long task proceeds, e.g unpacking a large distribution tarball instead of just specifying the -v option to the tar command. Still a bit of sugar coating but a bit of fun aswell. (-:

cheers,

Rob

Answer 2

See http://snippets.dzone.com/posts/show/6843