Mk is a reboot of the Plan 9 mk command, which itself is a successor to make. This tool is for anyone who loves make, but hates all its stupid bullshit.
go get github.com/dcjones/mk
$GOPATH/bin
is in your PATH
.Way back in the 90s, some smart guys at Bell Labs got together and decided to write new operating system to replace Unix. The idea was to keep everything that was great about Unix, but totally disregard backwards compatibility in a quest for something better. The operating system they designed, Plan 9, had a lot of terrific ideas, and though some were cherry picked, the OS as a whole never really caught on.
Among the gems in Plan 9 was a rewrite of the venerable Unix make command, in the form of mk. Simply put, mk is make, but with a large collection of relatively minor improvements, adding up to something more consistent, elegant, and powerful. To name a few specifics:
.SECONDARY:
.$target
, $prereq
, and $stem
in place of
make's pointlessly cryptic $@
, $^
, and $*
.%.o: %.c
), mk has more powerful regular
expression rules.<|sh config.sh
.$
.And much more! Read Maintaining Files on Plan 9 with Mk for good overview.
This mk stays mostly faithful to Plan 9, but makes a few (in my opinion) improvements.
-p=1
if this is the case.$stem1
,
$stem2
, etc, rather than \1
, \2
, etc.$shell
variable which will be sourced as the shell for recipe blocks
unless overriden by an 'S' attribute.-C
.mk [options] [target] ...
-f filename
Use the given file as the mkfile.-n
Dry run, print commands without actually executing.-r
Force building of the immediate targets.-a
Force building the targets and of all their dependencies.-p int
Maximum number of jobs to execute in parallel (default: 8).-i
Show rules that will execute and prompt before executing.-C
Colorize output.-F
Don't drop shell arguments when no further arguments are specified.-s name
Default shell to use if none are specified via $shell (default: "sh -c")Non-shell recipes are a major addition over Plan 9 mk. They can be used with the
S[command]
attribute, where command
is an arbitrary command that the recipe
will be piped into. For example, here's a recipe to add the read numbers from a
file and write their mean to another file. Unlike a typical recipe, it's written
in Julia.
mean.txt:Sjulia: input.txt
println(open("$target", "w"),
mean(map(parseint, eachline(open("$prereq")))))
Functional, but with some bugs and some unimplemented minor features. Give it a try and see what you think!