Re: setting a variable to be the result of severla shell commands...

[Paul D. Smith]

%% richard offer <address@hidden> writes:

  ro> I'm trying to set a variable (build number) to be the result of
  ro> several commands, so far I have :-

You cannot use multi-line commands inside make syntax in this version of
GNU make.  The only place that multi-lines operations are permitted is
within a command script.

  ro> define build-ver
  ro> BUILD_NUM=$(shell [ -f .build_num ] && cat .build_num )
  ro> NUM=$(if $(BUILD_NUM),$(shell expr $(BUILD_NUM) + 1),1)
  ro> $(strip $(1)build$(NUM))
  ro> endef

  ro> REL=$(call build-ver,4)

  ro> The intention being that if the file .build_num exists that the
  ro> contents are incremented by 1 and used to set REL, ie the first
  ro> build would set REL = 4build1, then, 4build2 etc (the code to
  ro> write the result back to .build_num is not shown).

Why not just write it in a longer $(shell ...) function?  One of the
nicest things about Bourne shell, unlike the horrible C shell, is that
you can write just about any script without needing newlines at all.

Why not something like (note, entirely untested...):

  build-ver := $(strip $(1)build${shell n=`cat .build_num 2>/dev/null`; case 
$$n in '') echo 1 ;; *) echo `expr $$n + 1` ;; esac})

  REL := $(call build-ver,4)

-- 
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