How can I set up an Xcode build rule with a variable output file list?

Question

Build Rules are documented in the Xcode Build System Guide

They are well adapted to the common case where one input file is transformed into a fixed number (usually one) of output files.

The output files must be described in the "Output Files" area of the build rule definition; one line per output file. Typically the output files have the same name as the input file but have different extensions.

In my case, one single input file is transformed into a variable number of files with the same extensions. The number and the names of the output files depend on the content of the input file and are not known in advance.

The output files will have to be further processed later on (they are in this case C files to be compiled).

How can I set up a build rule for such a case?

Any suggestions welcome.

(I asked the same question on the Apple developer forum, but I figured it'd be a good idea to ask here too).

Answer 1

I dealt with this by, instead of generating multiple C files, just concatenating them all together into one file (e.g. "AUTOGENERATED.c"), and specifying that as the output file.

So long as your output files don't contain anything that will conflict (static functions with the same name, conflicting #defines etc.) this works well.