Gaston Sanchez

Learning Objectives

• Meet Make’s wildcards
• Use the wildcard function
• Declare variables using wildcards

A typical situation occurs when you have several files with similar names and/or similar extensions, and you need to refer to them in a makefile. More precisely, you need to get a list with all their names.

Say you have a directory scripts/ with a bunch of R script files:

scripts/ 
    script1.R
    script2.R
    script3.R
    script4.R

If you are working in the shell, you can easily refer to the R script files using some wildcard like: script*.R or script* or simply *.R.

You can also use the wildcard * in Make. For instance, you could have the following dummy Makefile inside the folder scripts/ that would list the .R files every time you execute it:

list:
    ls *.R

In this case, the asterisk * is used in the recipe of the rule.

But what if you want to define a Make variable containing all these R files? A natural impulse would be to do something like this:

# variable for R scripts
rfiles = *.R

list:
    ls $(rfiles)

This works fine because the command ls accepts wildcards. But there is a catch.

Remember that a Make variable represents a string of text. This implies that the variable rfiles defined above has the value *.R. You can even tell Make to display the value of rfiles using echo:

# variable for R scripts
rfiles = *.R

list:
    echo $(rfiles)

Caution: the value of rfiles is NOT a list with the names script1.R, ..., script4.R. Instead, its value is just the string *.R

To create a variable rfiles that actually gathers the names of the R files, you need to use a special function in Make called the wildcard function:

rfiles = $(wildcard *.R)

list:
    echo $(rfiles)

To use the wildcard function you need to call it as a variable:

$(wildcard pattern)

where pattern is any pattern that you want wildcard to match.

Let’s go back to the 02-various-dependencies/ example that has these files:

02-various-dependencies/
    first.md
    second.md
    third.md
    Makefile

All the markdown files—first.md second.md third.md— are used to generate the file output.html via pandoc, and the Makefile looks like this:

output.html: first.md second.md third.md
    pandoc first.md second.md third.md -s -o output.html

This is a perfect example to put in practice the use of the wildcard function. You can write a Makefile with a variable mds whose value is the list of .md files:

mds = $(wildcard *.md)

output.html: $(mds)
    pandoc $(mds) -s -o output.html

In this case, mds is actually a string with the list of names: first.md second.md third.md. And we can use it in both the dependency of the rule, as well as in the recipe (i.e. the command).

Notice that pandoc can also take wildcards. This means that you could also have the following makefile, and it would work okay:

mds = *.md

output.html: $(mds)
    pandoc $(mds) -s -o output.html

But it’s important to note that the variable mds, defined without using the wildcard function, has a value of *.md (not the names of the .md files).