For loop through names in GNU make

Question

I have a bunch of .dot files (for example, a.dot, b.dot, c.dot) and I want to compile them to .png files with neato. Currently, the make command I have to do that looks something like this:

neato -Tpng -o a.png a.dot
neato -Tpng -o b.png b.dot
neato -Tpng -o c.png c.dot

Obviously, this is completely non-scalable, and I'd like to write something that will take every file with a .dot extension, and compile it to an equivalently-named .png file. I'm not sure how to write such a loop in make - any help would be appreciated.

Which 'make'? This might help: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1633527/wildcard-targets-in-a-makefile — John3136, Oct 16 '14 at 03:29

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 16 '14 at 11:58

1

This is pretty much basic make 101:

SRCS = a.dot b.dot c.dot

OBJS = $(SRCS:%.dot=%.png)

all: $(OBJS)

%.png : %.dot
        neato -Tpng -o $@ $<

You don't do "loops" in make; you define targets and prerequisites.

answered Oct 16 '14 at 11:58

MadScientist

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For loop through names in GNU make

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