[comp.unix.questions] Getting make file errors

sscott@camdev.UUCP (Steve Scott) (09/13/90)

Welp, my face is probably going to be many shades of red over this one
BUT I have RTFM and I can't seem to find what I need.

Specifically, I have some sources from another division in my company
for which I will soon be responsible.  The development machines
(Suns with Sun OS 4.0.1) and my machines (Apollo Domain OS 10.2,
Sys V.3) have the usual small compiler differences which I can
(usually!) workaround

But, I am having trouble with a couple of make files.  The problem is
that the make program will stop with errors like:

***Error code 28

OR

***Error code 1

or something like that and I CANNOT find where these different error
codes are documented and what they mean.  At least, they are not
in the man pages on my machine.  I know I can use the -i switch
and ignore these errors but I may be masking something important and
besides that, I just wanna know what is going on here

Any help or ideas?

Thanks in advance,

-- 
Steve Scott            UUCP: uunet!csccat!camdev!sscott
Motorola, Inc.         Internet : sscott@mot.com  Telephone : 1-817-232-6317

gwyn@smoke.BRL.MIL (Doug Gwyn) (09/14/90)

In article <282@camdev.UUCP> sscott@mot.com (Steve Scott,6317) writes:
>***Error code 28

Those are normally the exit status codes from the subprocesses
("shell commands" in the rules for dependencies).  The convention
is that a command returns a non-zero exit status when it is unable
to do its assigned task correctly.  "Make" honors this by reporting
the (one-byte) reported exit status of the failing subcommand; you
can tell "make" to ignore the error after reporting it by prefixing
the command in the Makefile with a "-", but most often there is a
genuine problem (such as telling the command to operate on a
nonexistent file), and in that case you should fix whatever it is
that caused the command to fail.