Is there any material about makefile in Windows?

Question

Is there any difference between makefile in Windows and Linux?

If I know how to use it in Linux, is it necessary to learn

something new when in Windows system?

Answer 1

Well, if you download "cygwin", you can run the "make" tool directly on windows, but you may want to look into a true cross-platform build tool such as "cmake". It's like make, but it's a bit more spiffy and is inherently cross-platform.

Answer 2

In addition to what iftrue note that Microsoft has a Makefile based build tool called nmake with some changes in syntax/semantics from the traditional *nix based make tool. This page lists some of the differences.

Answer 3

The fine folks over at GnuWin32 have Gnu make built for Windows as a native binary. It works well, but does have a few minor quirks due to a well-intentioned hack that tries to equate a target named foo with the file foo.exe. The GnuWin32 package does include a nice PDF of the manual, IIRC.

I use it on XP alongside GCC from the MinGW project, as well as with several different embedded systems cross compiler toolchains. MinGW also provides a native build of Gnu Make.

We do use Cygwin for a couple of projects, in particular one where the system-on-a-chip vendor provided a complete, working toolchain and build environment hosted in Cygwin. Moving it to a native Windows shaped build would be prohibitively expensive, and would make it harder to accept updates from the vendor.

If you want to use mostly native Windows tools, but need to start by running configure on an existing source kit, then take a look at MSYS. This started as a fork of Cygwin by the MinGW developers, and it intends to provide a minimal set of unix-like tools with a bash shell so that configure can be used on Windows. It isn't as complete as Cygwin, but it is a lot lighter weight.

You will find that the manual for Gnu Make is mostly true. However, you have to keep in mind that the content of a Makefile is not written in a single language. The stuff that defines variables and lays out the dependancy tree is one language. Each line of an action is a miniature shell script that is in the language of the default shell (which might be CMD.EXE rather than /bin/sh on Windows), and each command has options and arguments.

If you are comfortable with your *nix build environment, then Cygwin might be the path of least pain. But MSYS is often sufficient, and there is something to be said for adopting the native tools of the target platform so that you have a sense of how your users see Windows, in which case MinGW and GnuWin32 are handy resources to know about.