From: Eli Zaretskii <eliz AT is DOT elta DOT co DOT il>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: make
Date: Sat, 29 Jan 2000 10:52:56 +0200
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To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com
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Jason Green wrote:
> 
> > Why cannot you delete it unconditionally?  If it doesn't exist, deleting it
> > won't do any harm, right?
> 
> Except that DEL says "File not found" if the file does not exist.  I
> have not tried this in a makefile but in DOS you can type:
> 
> if exist filename del filename

This works in a Makefile as well (any command you can type from a command
line should work in a Makefile).

> For a portable makefile it may be better to use rm (from the package
> fil316b.zip),  this won't complain if the file does not exist:
> 
> rm -f filename

"rm -f" is only portable to Unix.  There's no portable way of deleting a
file.  As a matter of fact, there's no portable way to write commands in a
Makefile at all, since all commands assume some specific shell or class of
shells.