RE: why is ./foobar target noted as foobar ??

[Paul Smith]

Please don't top-post.

On Thursday, March 01, 2012 10:00 AM, Mark Galeck (CW) wrote:
> With this makefile
> 
> ./foobar:
>                 touch $@
> 
> make prints "touch foobar" .  

On Thu, 2012-03-01 at 10:17 -0800, Mark Galeck (CW) wrote:
> I know the manual says "$@ is the _file_ name" but surely, this does
> not literally mean "only the file name not the directory".  For
> example, dir/foobar works.  Also dir/./foobar works.  Only "." at the
> very beginning does not work.

No, it does not literally mean that.

This is a special feature to handle only "./" (and "././", etc.) that
was added to GNU make a long, long time ago; from the manual:

   * Strip leading sequences of `./' from file names, so that `./FILE'
     and `FILE' are considered to be the same file.

It has been considered a bug before, and I don't necessarily disagree.
That is, I'm OK with make recognizing that the strings "./foo" and "foo"
refer to the same file on the disk for the purposes of determining
out-of-dateness etc. but I don't think make should be changing the value
of address@hidden

On the other hand, what should make do if it sees two rules like:

./foo: ; @echo with dir
foo: ; @echo without dir

...?

See also https://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/index.php?10708

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