As part of a (bash) script file, which has set -e, I do make distclean which, obviously, fails with the following error, if I have run distclean before calling the script:

make: *** No rule to make target 'distclean'. Stop

Is there way to do distclean and not fail, if nothing to clean?

CodePudding user response：

If you're okay with the error message being printed, and just want to ignore the failure and keep going, a common idiom is to append || :.

The general syntax here is cmd1 || cmd2. If cmd1 fails then it runs cmd2. : is the (unusual) name of a command that always succeeds, so || : has the effect of ignoring the first command's exit code.

make distclean || :

If you would rather not see an error message at all, you could check if the Makefile exists first:

if [[ -e Makefile ]]; then make distclean; fi

CodePudding user response：

You could do a

make distclean || echo "(Error from make ignored)"

to make it explicit what's happening.