Re: is $* the complete path?

[Assar Westerlund]

"Paul D. Smith" <address@hidden> writes:

> %% Assar Westerlund <address@hidden> writes:
> 
>   aw> While building the current autoconf with gnu-make 3.75 I've had
>   aw> problems in `man', since $* did get expanded to the complete path of
>   aw> the dependency and not just the file name.  I've seen similar
>   aw> behaviour from other instances of make, and while not knowing what is
>   aw> the correct way for making to behave here I think some extra care
>   aw> doesn't hurt.
> 
> The $* variable always expands to the entire part of the target filename
> which _doesn't_ match the suffix.

> If the suffix is ".x" and the target is "foo.x", then $* is foo.  If the
> target is "/bar/baz/biz/foo.x", then $* is /bar/baz/biz/foo.

Weird.  I had the following case (hopefully these parts of the
Makefile are enough), from autoconf's man/Makefile.am:

srcdir = /a/long/path/man
top_srcdir = /a/long/path
VPATH = /a/long/path/man

top_builddir = ..

.x.1:
        if test -f $(top_builddir)/$*; then \
        ...

and I was getting:

if test -f ..//a/long/path/man/autoconf; then \

Since the target should have been "autoconf.1", I don't see why the
vpath gets added to $* ?

And is using basename a reasonably solution in this case?

/assar