Myujth

I'm doing a project in c and utilizing the unity testing framework. I've downloaded their makefile directly but have an issue with it on my Mac (Mojave). The basic conclusion is that the '%' wildcard in target definitions doesn't seem to work.

With the following rule:

PATHR = build/results/
$(PATHR)%.txt: $(PATHB)%.$(TARGET_EXTENSION)
 -./$< > $@ 2>&1

I get the following make error:

make: *** No rule to make target `build/results/TestVectorCode.txt', needed by `test'. Stop.

However, if I define the rule explicitly without the '%' as follows:

build/results/TestVectorCode.txt: $(PATHB)%.$(TARGET_EXTENSION)
 -./$< > $@ 2>&1

I don't get the make error. Any thoughts?

This message means that the prerequisite of your rule is not found and cannot be created (by "prerequisite" I mean $(PATHB)TestVectorCode.$(TARGET_EXTENSION)--you don't show what the values of those variables are so I can't expand them for you).

A pattern rule suggests one possible way that a target can be built. There can be lots of patterns that can build the same target, so the fact that one of them doesn't match is not by itself fatal. Only if all of them don't match, will make give this error that it can't find any rule to build the target.

You must have a typo in your "rule that works" example because surely it's not relying on a file actually named %, right?

If you can't figure it out you can try running make -d build/results/TestVectorCode.txt and examine the output to see why make is rejecting your pattern rule (probably redirect the output because it will be a lot).

Another thing is that I know that the version of GNU make that comes with Xcode is very old, and has bugs. I don't think they would cause something like this but I'm not sure. If you can you might try installing the latest version of GNU make using brew (for example) and see if you get the same behavior.