Makefile note-findstring

$(findstring find,in)

Searches in for an occurrence of find. If it occurs, the value is find; otherwise, the value is empty. You can use this function in a conditional to test for the presence of a specific substring in a given string. Thus, the two examples,

$(findstring a,a b c)
$(findstring a,b c)

produce the values `a' and `' (the empty string), respectively.

You can write a conditional that tests make command flags such as `-t' by using the variable MAKEFLAGS together with the findstring function (see section Functions for String Substitution and Analysis). This is useful when touch is not enough to make a file appear up to date.

The findstring function determines whether one string appears as a substring of another. If you want to test for the `-t' flag, use `t' as the first string and the value of MAKEFLAGS as the other.

For example, here is how to arrange to use `ranlib -t' to finish marking an archive file up to date:

archive.a: ...
ifneq (,$(findstring t,$(MAKEFLAGS)))
       +touch archive.a
       +ranlib -t archive.a
else
       ranlib archive.a
endif

The `+' prefix marks those command lines as "recursive" so that they will be executed despite use of the `-t' flag. See section Recursive Use of make.