7.3 Conditionals that Test Flags

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

Recall that MAKEFLAGS will put all single-letter options (such as ‘-t’) into the first word, and that word will be empty if no single-letter options were given. To work with this, it’s helpful to add a value at the start to ensure there’s a word: for example ‘-$(MAKEFLAGS)’.

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 first word 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 (,$(findstring t,$(firstword -$(MAKEFLAGS))))
        +touch archive.a
        +ranlib -t archive.a
else
        ranlib archive.a
endif

The ‘+’ prefix marks those recipe lines as “recursive” so that they will be executed despite use of the ‘-t’ flag. See Recursive Use of make.