> On Mar 18, 2022, at 3:19 AM, Ambrus Sumegi <ambrus.sum...@arm.com> wrote:
>
> Thanks a lot for your suggestions, Martin and Paul. I understand the
> reasoning behind why Make cannot improve this behavior, and the conditional
> execution of tee that you both proposed looks like a concise and elegant
> solution to my problem. My only remaining concern is about the man page,
> which currently has this rather vague description of the switch in question:
>
> -n, --just-print, --dry-run, --recon
> Print the commands that would be executed, but do not execute
> them (except in certain circumstances).
>
> Perhaps the "(except in certain circumstances)" could be expanded to
> something like "If the line contains a call to $(MAKE), the entire line will
> still be executed, with the -n option passed to the sub-make instance. Be
> prepared for side effects of output redirection."
+1 to this. Proposal:
Print the commands that would be executed, but do not execute them in most
cases.
Note: If the line contains a call to $(MAKE), the entire line will still be
executed, with the -n option passed to the sub-make instance that is run.
Also, be prepared for side effects of output redirection.
(If someone has a better way to write that last sentence, please do so.)
It's a pretty important exception, so it should be explicitly described in the
summary.
--- David A. Wheeler
