Use the same makefile for make (Linux) and nmake (Windows)

Question

I have a simple C program (one source file) which I want to compile on Linux and on Windows via make and nmake, respectively. Is there a possibility to accomplish this with a single makefile?

I thought about something like

ifeq($(MAKE), nmake)     // nmake code here else     // make code here endif 

Unfortunately nmake seems not to understand ifeq, so I cannot use that. I have a working makefile, but that produces very ugly results:

hello: hello.c     $(CC) hello.c 

That works on both systems. The problem is that the outcome depends on the default behaviors of the respective compilers. Under Linux I get an executeable named 'a.out' rather than 'hello'. Under Windows I get 'hello.exe' but there is also 'hello.obj' which I do not want to have.

Is there an alternative way? Or is what I'm trying absolutely impossible?

Answer 1

It's probably not impossible, but most likely so hard that it would be easier to write two makefiles anyway.

Both GNU make (used in Linux) and nmake have include directives though, so some common things can be put in a common makefile that is included by the main makefile.

Answer 2

You should look at using CMake for this. With one source file, it should be quite easy. Here is how you could set up a simple project:

cmake_minimum_required(VERSION 3.10)  # set the project name project(Hello)  # add the executable add_executable(Hello hello.c) 

To build the simple project, you would do the following (this assumes your source and CMakeLists.txt files are in the same directory as the source file hello.c:

mkdir build cd build cmake .. cmake --build .