Run make in each subdirectory

Question

I have a directory (root_dir), that contains a number of sub-directories (subdir1, subdir2, ...).

I want to run the make in each directory in root_dir, using a Makefile placed in it. (Obviously supposed that each of subdir... has inside its own Makefile).

So there are essentially two questions:

1. How to get a list of directories in Makefile (automatically)?
2. How to run make for each of the directories inside a make file?

As I know in order to run make in a specific directory I need to do the following:

$(MAKE) -C subdir 

Answer 1

There are various problems with doing the sub-make inside a for loop in a single recipe. The best way to do multiple subdirectories is like this:

SUBDIRS := $(wildcard */.)  all: $(SUBDIRS) $(SUBDIRS):         $(MAKE) -C $@  .PHONY: all $(SUBDIRS) 

(Just to point out this is GNU make specific; you didn't mention any restrictions on the version of make you're using).

ETA Here's a version which supports multiple top-level targets.

TOPTARGETS := all clean  SUBDIRS := $(wildcard */.)  $(TOPTARGETS): $(SUBDIRS) $(SUBDIRS):         $(MAKE) -C $@ $(MAKECMDGOALS)  .PHONY: $(TOPTARGETS) $(SUBDIRS) 

Answer 2

Try this :

SUBDIRS = foo bar baz  subdirs:     for dir in $(SUBDIRS); do \         $(MAKE) -C $$dir; \     done 

This may help you link

Edit : you can also do :

The simplest way is to do:

CODE_DIR = code  .PHONY: project_code  project_code:        $(MAKE) -C $(CODE_DIR) 

The .PHONY rule means that project_code is not a file that needs to be built, and the -C flag indicates a change in directory (equivalent to running cd code before calling make). You can use the same approach for calling other targets in the code Makefile.

For example:

clean:    $(MAKE) -C $(CODE_DIR) clean 

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