How can I force make to exit if compiling one dependency fails?

Question

I've posted the relevant bits of my makefile. When I run make all on this makefile, there's a compilation error when compiling debugosd.o. However, because make found a previously built debugosd.o, it just continues on to build dialup.otz.

Without deleting all the .o's, how can I force debugosd.o to become out-of-date - and so force make to stop as soon as it hits the compilation error in debugosd.o?

The rule to build .o files is:

%.o: %.c
    $(TITLE)
    $(CC) $(COMPILE) $(C_OPTIONS) -c $<

And the makefile snippet is:

all: shared0.flw shared1.flw shared2.flw shared3.flw

debugosd.o: debugosd.c debugosd.h
xdialler_interface_new.o: xdialler_interface.h
dialup.ooo: xdialler_interface_new.o debugosd.o xDialler.a
    $(TITLE)
    $(MAKE_OOO)

dialup.otz: dialup.ooo  
    $(BIN)opress $< 

shared1.dir: dialup.otz 
    $(TITLE)
    $(BIN)dirbuild $(SHAREDDIR1_OPTIONS)

shared1.flw: shared1.dir 
    $(TITLE)
    $(BIN)flwbuild $(SHAREDFLW_OPTIONS1)

Actually, I figured out what the problem was. I was forcing the rebuild of shared1.flw using a phony target. I think this was then forcing make to continue regardless of errors.

Answer 1

You have no specific subcommands listed for debugosd.o so I'm assuming it's using the default, somewhere (such as .c.o).

Make should exit if any of the subcommands return a non-zero exit code, unless the command begins with -. Check the actual command that's being used for the dubugosd.o target.

Whether there's a previously built file shouldn't matter, make should not carry on after an error condition.