How to tell CMake where to put build files?

Question

I want to tell CMake to output files and folders to a different folder instead of the current folder. I'm talking about the generated files by CMake below:

• file: CMakeCache.txt
• dir: CMakeFiles/
• file: Makefile
• dir: bin/
• file: cmake_install.cmake

Is there a way to let CMake output these files and folders in another folder? I wrote a tool that executes CMake from the root of the project-directory, as a result my project-directory gets messed up with the generated files and folders listed above.

Here a link what I want: http://pastebin.com/cxykCi5M

Hope this will clarify more what I want.

Answer 1

You can use the undocumented command line options -B and -H to specify your build directory and source directory respectively. So, from your project's root, you can do:

cmake -Bbuild -H. 

(Where build is your build directory path.)