dumb question

Ed Greshko Ed.Greshko at greshko.com
Wed Jan 4 08:28:46 UTC 2012


On 01/04/2012 04:22 PM, Paul Allen Newell wrote:
> And that's the confusion on my end. You are stating that Marvin says
> "make it +x" and you are saying it doesn't need to be. I asked this
> dumb question to find out how I should treat this situation regardless
> of "what works". Its about understanding whether a makefile is an
> executable or if make is just treating it as input and the executable
> part is under the hood. 

No....  I'm saying that Marvin first said that the Makefile should be +x
but later corrected himself to say that it was /usr/bin/make he was
thinking of and that certainly needs to be +x because it is the
executable....

[egreshko at f16-2 egreshko]$ file /usr/bin/make
/usr/bin/make: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV),
dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.32, stripped

Again, "Makefile" or "makefile" need not be executable and in fact they
aren't meant to be executable.

[egreshko at misty transcode-1.0.2]$ chmod +x Makefile
[egreshko at misty transcode-1.0.2]$ ./Makefile
./Makefile: line 19: srcdir: command not found
./Makefile: line 20: top_srcdir: command not found
./Makefile: line 22: datadir: command not found
./Makefile: line 22: pkgdatadir: command not found
./Makefile: line 23: libdir: command not found
./Makefile: line 23: pkglibdir: command not found
./Makefile: line 24: includedir: command not found

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