Recursive Make passing targets in OS X

Question

I am trying to write a recursive clean target for GNU Makefile on OS X (GNU Make 3.81 - from XCode). Following GNU Make documentation, I came up with the following:

Main Makefile

ALLSUBMAKES=$(wildcard ./*/Makefile)
ALLSUBDIRS=$(patsubst %/Makefile,%,$(ALLSUBMAKES))
.PHONY: submakes clean $(ALLSUBDIRS)

submakes: $(ALLSUBDIRS)

clean: $(ALLSUBDIRS)

$(ALLSUBDIRS):
    $(MAKE) -C $@

Submake Makefiles

mainTarget:
    #do something here

clean:
    #some clean operation

The problem:

I find that $(MAKE) passes only the make executable full path name ignoring targets and all other command line options (like -j5 for example). All submakes end up executing the mainTarget when I issue make clean on the top level. What is the right way to implement such recursive clean targets? Or how to pass target along with all command line arguments to submakes?

Answer 1

The way I've seen this done is to collect all the targets into one rule that goes into each subdir:

build clean install:
     @for dir in $(ALLSUBDIRS); do $(MAKE) -C "$$dir" $@; done

You might be able use do something with the builtin variable MAKEFLAGS which is automatically exported to sub-makes.

---

You could try suffixing the desired action to the target, then splitting this pseudo target to extract the action again later:

default: $(addsuffix .default,$(ALLSUBDIRS))
clean:   $(addsuffix .clean,$(ALLSUBDIRS))

%.default:
        $(MAKE) -C $*
%.clean:
        $(MAKE) -C $* clean